Isabel Wilkerson

Isabel Wilkerson (born 1961) is an American journalist and the author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (2010) and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020).

She is the first woman of African-American heritage to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism.

Wilkerson was the editor-in-chief of the Howard University college newspaper, interned at the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post, and became the Chicago Bureau Chief of The New York Times.

She also taught at Emory, Princeton, Northwestern, and Boston University.

Wilkerson interviewed over a thousand people for The Warmth of Other Suns, which documents the stories of African Americans who migrated to northern and western cities during the 20th century.

Her book Caste describes the racial hierarchy in the United States as a caste system.

Both books were best-sellers.

Isabel Wilkerson was born in Washington, D.C. in 1961 to parents who left Virginia during the Great Migration.

Her father was one of the Tuskegee Airmen during World War II and became a bridge engineer after the war.

Wilkerson studied journalism at Howard University, becoming editor-in-chief of the college newspaper The Hilltop.

During college, she interned at publications including the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post.

Several of Wilkerson's articles are included in the book Pulitzer Prize Feature Stories: America's Best Writing, 1979 - 2003, edited by David Garlock.

She has been the 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 and Professor of Journalism and Director of Narrative Nonfiction at Boston University's College of Communication.

She also served as a board member of the National Arts in Journalism Program at Columbia University.

She married Roderick Jeffrey Watts in Fort Washington, Maryland in 1989.

In 1994, while the Chicago Bureau Chief of The New York Times, she became the first woman of African-American heritage 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.

He had been diagnosed with a brain tumor in 2000.

Wilkerson has also been awarded honorary doctorates from several universities:

In 2023, Ava DuVernay filmed Origin, a biographical drama about Wilkerson and the writing of her book Caste.

Aunjanue Ellis played the leading role.

After fifteen years of research and writing, she published The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration in 2010, 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 5 on the New York Times Bestseller list for nonfiction and has since been included in lists of best books of 2010 by many reviewers, including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, Amazon.com, Salon.com, The Washington Post, The Economist, Atlanta Magazine and The Daily Beast.

In a 2010 New York Times interview, Wilkerson described herself as being part of a movement of African Americans who have chosen to return to the South after generations in the North.

Wilkerson's book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents argues that racial stratification in the United States is best understood as a caste system, akin to those in India and in Nazi Germany.

In March 2011 the book won the National Book Critics Circle Award (Nonfiction).

The book won the Anisfield-Wolf Award for Nonfiction, the Mark Lynton History Prize, the Sidney Hillman Book Prize, the Heartland Prize for Nonfiction and was the nonfiction runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize in 2011.

Her second husband, Brett Kelly Hamilton, died in 2015.

A 2020 review in The New York Times described it as "an instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far."

Publishers Weekly called Caste a "powerful and extraordinarily timely social history."

The Chicago Tribune wrote that the book was "among the year's best" books.

The book peaked at number one on The New York Times nonfiction best-seller list.

On October 14, 2020, Netflix announced Ava DuVernay will write, direct, and produce a feature film adaptation of Caste.

Wilkerson has been married twice.