Isabel Wilkerson

Isabel Wilkerson is the author of two of the most important nonfiction books of the twenty-first century: The Warmth of Other Suns (2010), which documented the Great Migration of six million Black Americans from the South to the North and West, and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020), which reframed American racism as a caste system comparable to those in India and Nazi Germany. Both books transformed how Americans understand their own history.

Born in Washington, D.C., in 1961, Wilkerson was the daughter of parents who had both migrated from the South — her mother from Georgia, her father from Virginia. She attended Howard University and became a journalist, working for The New York Times, where she won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 1994 — the first Black woman to receive the honor.

The Warmth of Other Suns took 15 years to research and write. Wilkerson interviewed over 1,200 people and wove together three individual stories to create an epic narrative of the Great Migration. The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award and is considered the definitive account of one of the most significant demographic shifts in American history. Caste became an Oprah's Book Club selection and a cultural touchstone, providing a new vocabulary for discussing racial hierarchy that has been adopted by scholars, politicians, and ordinary citizens.