Isabel Wilkerson is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal. Her new book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, is a New York Times bestseller and was named “an instant American classic” by Dwight Garner and selected for Oprah’s Book Club. Her debut work, The Warmth of Other Suns, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Heartland Prize for Nonfiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Award for Nonfiction, the Lynton History Prize from Harvard and Columbia Universities, and the Stephen Ambrose Oral History Prize.
Isabel is a native of Washington, D.C., and a daughter of the Great Migration, the mass movement about which she would go on to write. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 1994 as Chicago Bureau Chief of The New York Times, making her the first African American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism.