Wilkerson, Isabel

Impact on the world

At age 33, Wilkerson won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for her New York Times reporting on Midwestern floods and a ten-year-old boy raising his siblings, becoming the first Black woman in the history of American journalism to win a Pulitzer and the first Black journalist to win for individual reporting; her Chicago bureau chief tenure also included reporting from South Africa on daily life under and after apartheid. Drawing on the 1998 Guggenheim Fellowship she received, Wilkerson spent 15 years and interviewed more than 1,200 people researching The Warmth of Other Suns, published in 2010, a narrative history of the Great Migration told through three individuals who left the Jim Crow South for the North and West; the book won the National Book Critics Circle Award, was named to Time's list of the 10 Best Nonfiction Books of the Decade, and was later named the No. 1 nonfiction book of the twenty-first century by The New York Times. Her 2020 follow-up, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, examined American racial hierarchy through comparison with India's caste system and Nazi Germany, became Oprah's Book Club's summer selection and a No. 1 New York Times bestseller, and was adapted into the 2023 feature film Origin, directed by Ava DuVernay. President Obama awarded Wilkerson the National Humanities Medal in 2016 for “championing the stories of an unsung history,” and she has taught narrative nonfiction at Princeton, Emory, Northwestern, and Boston University.

Life & background

Born in 1961 in Washington, D.C., to parents who had migrated north from Georgia and Virginia, including a father who served as a Tuskegee Airman, Wilkerson graduated from Howard University, where she edited the student newspaper, before interning at the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post and joining The New York Times, where she became Chicago Bureau Chief. She left daily journalism in the mid-1990s to research and write her books, and continues to write, teach, and lecture on narrative nonfiction and American history.

Sources

1. Encyclopædia Britannica; National Endowment for the Humanities; isabelwilkerson.com