Isabel Wilkerson
Doctor of Humane Letters
Heralded as one of the most important narrative nonfiction writers of our time, Isabel Wilkerson is the author of two critically acclaimed bestsellers, both published by Random House: “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration” (2010) and “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” (2020).
“The Warmth of Other Suns,” which earned a National Book Critics Circle Award, focuses on the personal experiences of three individuals to tell the sweeping history of the six million Black Americans who left the South in search of better lives between World War I and 1970. In 2024, The New York Times named it the No. 1 Nonfiction Book of the 21st Century and the No. 2 Best Book of the 21st Century.
“Caste,” which also relies on the true stories of real people, shows how an insidious hidden caste system in America determines who holds power and agency. A New York Times review called it “a book that changes the weather inside a reader” and “an instant American classic.” Time magazine named it the No. 1 Nonfiction Book of the Year.
Wilkerson began her professional career as a newspaper journalist. In 1994, while working as Chicago bureau chief at The New York Times, she won a Pulitzer Prize in journalism, honored in the feature writing category for her articles on the 1993 Midwestern floods and her profile of a 10-year-old Chicago boy who became a de facto parent to his four siblings. Wilkerson is the first Black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism and the first Black journalist to win for individual reporting.
A graduate of Howard University, she has lectured at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism, and taught at Princeton, Emory and Boston University.