Isabel Wilkerson
Journalist and nonfiction author
Isabel Wilkerson is an American journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize. She wrote The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste.
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American Born 1961 in Washington, D.C., United States
About Isabel Wilkerson
In 1994, Isabel Wilkerson received a Pulitzer Prize for her reporting as head of the Chicago bureau of The New York Times. No African-American woman had won a Pulitzer for journalism before her. In 2016, President Barack Obama awarded her the National Humanities Medal. Her first book, The Warmth of Other Suns, follows the Great Migration, when African Americans moved to cities in the North and West during the 1900s. More than a thousand people were interviewed for it. Caste, published in 2020, examines American racial hierarchy through the idea of a caste system. Both books were bestsellers. As a student, Wilkerson was editor-in-chief of the Howard University newspaper, and she interned at the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. She has taught at Emory University and Princeton University.