Warmth of Other Suns (Wilkerson) - Author Bio

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Washington, D.C., USA
• Education—B.A., Howard University
• Awards—Pulitizer Prize (twice); National Book Critics Circle Award; George S. Polk Award; Journalist of the Year Award from The National Association of Black Journalists.
• Currently—lives in in Boston, Massachusetts


Isabel Wilkerson is a journalist and the author, in 2010, of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, which won the Pulitizer Prize, as well as the Book Critics Circle Award. In 2020, she published Caste: The Origins of our Discontents, a book that also received wide critical acclaim..

Born in Washington D.C., Wilkerson studied journalism at Howard University, becoming editor-in-chief of the college newspaper The Hilltop. During college, Wilkerson interned at many publications, including the The Los Angeles Times and Washington Post.

In 1994, while Chicago bureau chief of The New York Times, she became the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism, winning the feature writing award for her coverage of the 1993 midwestern floods and her profile of a 10-year-old boy who was responsible for his four siblings. Several of Wilkerson's articles are included in the book Pulitzer Prize Feature Stories: America's Best Writing, 1979 - 2003, edited by David Garlock.

Wilkerson has also won a George S. Polk Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Journalist of the Year award from the National Association of Black Journalists.

She has also held the positions of James M. Cox Professor of Journalism at Emory University, Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University and the Kreeger-Wolf endowed lecturer at Northwestern University. She also served as a board member of the National Arts in Journalism Program at Columbia University.

Wilkerson is now a Professor of Journalism and Director of Narrative Nonfiction in the College of Communications at Boston University.

After fourteen years of research, she has just released a book called The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, which examines the three geographic routes that were commonly used by African Americans leaving the southern states between 1915 and the 1970s, illustrated through the personal stories of people who took those routes.

During her research for the book, Wilkerson interviewed more than 1,000 people who made the migration from the South to Northern and Western cities. The book almost instantly hit number 11 on the NYT Bestseller list for nonfiction and has since been included in lists of best books of 2010 by many reviewers, including Salon.com, Atlanta Magazine, New Yorker, Washington Post, Economist, and The Daily Beast. (From Wikipedia.)