Isabel Wilkerson

Last updated

Isabel Wilkerson
Isabel wilkerson 2010.jpg
Wilkerson at the 2010 Texas Book Festival
Born1961 (age 6263)
Washington, D.C., U.S.
OccupationJournalist, author
Education Howard University (BA)
Genre Journalism, History
Notable works The Warmth of Other Suns
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
Notable awards George S. Polk Award
Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing
Journalist of the Year by the National Association of Black Journalists
National Book Critics Circle Award (Nonfiction)
Anisfield-Wolf Book Award

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. [1]

Contents

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.

Early life and education

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. [2]

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 . [3]

Career

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, [1] 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. [4] 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. [3] [5]

External videos
Nuvola apps kaboodle.svg Q&A interview with Isabel Wilkerson on The Warmth of Other Suns, September 26, 2010, C-SPAN

After fifteen years of research and writing, she published The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration [6] 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. [7] 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 . [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] In March 2011 the book won the National Book Critics Circle Award (Nonfiction). The book won the Anisfield-Wolf Award [14] 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.

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. [15]

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. [16] 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." [16] Publishers Weekly called Caste a "powerful and extraordinarily timely social history." [17] The Chicago Tribune wrote that the book was "among the year's best" books. [18] The book peaked at number one on The New York Times nonfiction best-seller list. [19] On October 14, 2020, Netflix announced Ava DuVernay will write, direct, and produce a feature film adaptation of Caste. [20]

Personal life

Wilkerson has been married twice. She married Roderick Jeffrey Watts in Fort Washington, Maryland in 1989. [21] Her second husband, Brett Kelly Hamilton, died in 2015 after having been diagnosed with a brain tumor in 2000. [22]

Bibliography

Books

Essays, columns and lectures

Awards

Wilkerson has also been awarded honorary doctorates from several universities:

Legacy

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

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Louise Erdrich</span> American author (born 1954)

Karen Louise Erdrich is an American author of novels, poetry, and children's books featuring Native American characters and settings. She is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, a federally recognized tribe of Ojibwe people.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John McPhee</span> American writer

John Angus McPhee is an American writer. He is considered one of the pioneers of creative nonfiction. He is a four-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in the category General Nonfiction, and he won that award on the fourth occasion in 1999 for Annals of the Former World. In 2008, he received the George Polk Career Award for his "indelible mark on American journalism during his nearly half-century career". Since 1974, McPhee has been the Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing</span> American journalism award

The Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing is one of the fourteen American Pulitzer Prizes that are annually awarded for Journalism. It has been awarded since 1979 for a distinguished example of feature writing giving prime consideration to high literary quality and originality.

Jay Anthony Lukas was an American journalist and author, best known for his 1985 book Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families. Common Ground is a classic study of race relations, class conflict, and school busing in Boston, Massachusetts, as seen through the eyes of three families: one upper-middle-class white, one working-class white, and one working-class African-American.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Geraldine Brooks (writer)</span> Australian-American journalist and novelist

Geraldine Brooks is an Australian-American journalist and novelist whose 2005 novel March won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rick Atkinson</span> American author (born 1952)

Lawrence Rush "Rick" Atkinson IV is an American author, most recently of The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775–1777, the first volume in the Revolution Trilogy. He has won Pulitzer Prizes in history and journalism.

Richard Read is a freelance reporter based in Seattle, where he was a national reporter and bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times from 2019 to 2021. A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, he was a senior writer and foreign correspondent for The Oregonian, working for the Portland, Oregon newspaper from 1981 to 1986 and 1989 until 2016.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ted Conover</span> American author and journalist (born 1958)

Ted Conover is an American author and journalist who has been called a "master of immersion" and "master of experience-based narrative nonfiction." A graduate of Amherst College and a former Marshall Scholar, he is also a professor and past director of the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University. He teaches graduate courses in the New York University Literary Reportage concentration, as well as undergraduate courses on the "journalism of empathy" and undercover reporting.

Bill Dedman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American investigative reporter and co-author of the biography of reclusive heiress Huguette Clark, Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune.

Sonia Nazario is an American journalist mostly known for her work at Los Angeles Times. She has spent her career writing about social and social justice issues, focusing especially on immigration and immigrant children who come to the United States from Central America. In 2003, while working at the Los Angeles Times, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for her six-part series titled "Enrique's Journey," which followed the harrowing story of a young Honduran boy's journey to the US when he was only five years old. "Enrique's Journey: The Story of a Boy's Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with His Mother" was published as a book in 2006 and became a national bestseller.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jennifer Egan</span> Novelist, short story writer

Jennifer Egan is an American novelist and short-story writer. Her novel A Visit from the Goon Squad won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. From 2018 to 2020, she served as the president of PEN America.

Brent Staples is an American author and member of the editorial board of The New York Times, where he specializes in coverage of education, criminal justice and economics. His books include An American Love Story and Parallel Time: Growing up In Black and White, He writes about political, social and cultural issues, including race and the state of the American school system.

Michael Capuzzo is an American journalist and author best known for his New York Times-bestselling nonfiction books The Murder Room and Close to Shore He was formerly a reporter with the Miami Herald and the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he received four Pulitzer Prize nominations. The Murder Room, the true story of a private dining club of famous detectives who solve cold murders, and Close to Shore, an historic thriller and recreation of the first American shark attack in World War I-era New Jersey, both enjoyed wide acclaim from critics and authors such as Gay Talese, Mark Bowden, John Sanford, and Michael Connelly.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dan Fagin</span> American journalist (born 1963)

Dan Fagin is an American journalist who specializes in environmental science. He won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for his best-selling book Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation. Toms River also won the Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism, the National Academies Communication Award, and the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award of the Society of Environmental Journalists, among other literary prizes.

<i>The Hemingses of Monticello</i> 2008 book by Annette Gordon-Reed

The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family is a 2008 book by American historian Annette Gordon-Reed. It recounts the history of four generations of the African-American Hemings family, from their African and Virginia origins until the 1826 death of Thomas Jefferson, their master and the father of Sally Hemings' children.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Katherine Boo</span> American investigative journalist

Katherine "Kate" J. Boo is an American investigative journalist who has documented the lives of people in poverty. She has won the MacArthur "genius" award (2002) and the National Book Award for Nonfiction (2012), and her work earned the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for The Washington Post. She has been a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine since 2003. Her book Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity won nonfiction prizes from PEN, the Los Angeles Times Book Awards, the New York Public Library, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, in addition to the National Book Award for Nonfiction.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andrea Elliott</span> American journalist

Andrea Elliott is an American journalist and a staff writer for The New York Times. She is the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in both Journalism (2007) and Letters (2022). She received the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for a series of articles on an Egyptian-born imam living in Brooklyn and the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City, a book about Dasani, a young girl enduring homelessness in New York City.

<i>The Warmth of Other Suns</i> 2010 book by Isabel Wilkerson

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (2010) is a historical study of the Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. The book was widely acclaimed by critics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">S. C. Gwynne</span> American nonfiction writer

Samuel C. Gwynne III is an American writer. He holds a bachelor's degree in history from Princeton University and a master's degree in writing from Johns Hopkins University.

<i>Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents</i> 2020 book by Isabel Wilkerson

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is a nonfiction book by the American journalist Isabel Wilkerson, published in August 2020 by Random House. The book describes racism in the United States as an aspect of a caste system—a society-wide system of social stratification characterized by notions such as hierarchy, inclusion and exclusion, and purity. Wilkerson does so by comparing aspects of the experience of American people of color to the caste systems of India and Nazi Germany, and she explores the impact of caste on societies shaped by them, and their people.

References

  1. 1 2 "30 Moments in Journalism". NABJ. Archived from the original on October 6, 2008. Retrieved June 18, 2008.
  2. "Racism' Did Not Seem Sufficient.' Author Isabel Wilkerson on the American Caste System". Time. July 23, 2020. Retrieved November 18, 2020.
  3. 1 2 "Emory University Education Program". Emory University. Archived from the original on December 2, 2008. Retrieved June 18, 2008.
  4. "First Born, Fast Grown: The Manful Life of Nicholas, 10 (April 4, 1993)" (PDF). The New York Times . Retrieved June 18, 2008.
  5. "Isabel Wilkerson, Director, Narrative Nonfiction Program". Boston University. Archived from the original on December 5, 2010. Retrieved December 12, 2010.
  6. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, Random House official website.
  7. "Great Migration: The African-American Exodus North". National Public Radio. Retrieved December 12, 2010.
  8. Teresa Weaver. "The Shelf: Top Ten of 2010". Atlanta Magazine. Archived from the original on December 6, 2010. Retrieved December 12, 2010.
  9. Laura Miller. "The best nonfiction books of 2010". Salon.com. Retrieved December 12, 2010.
  10. "A Year's Reading: Reviewers' favorites from 2010". The New Yorker. Retrieved December 12, 2010.
  11. "Books of the Year: Page turners". The Economist. December 2, 2010. Retrieved December 12, 2010.
  12. "Best nonfiction of 2010". The Washington Post . December 10, 2010. Retrieved December 12, 2010.
  13. "The Best of the Best Books 2010". The Daily Beast. Retrieved December 12, 2010.
  14. "Home". Anisfield-Wolf. Retrieved September 16, 2020.
  15. McGrath, Charles (September 8, 2010). Charles McGrath, "A Writer's Long Journey to Trace the Great Migration", The New York Times.
  16. 1 2 Garner, Dwight (July 31, 2020). "Isabel Wilkerson's 'Caste' Is an 'Instant American Classic' About Our Abiding Sin". The New York Times .
  17. "Nonfiction book review: Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents". Publishers Weekly.
  18. Borrelli, Christopher (August 3, 2020). "Isabel Wilkerson's 'Caste' is about the strict lines that keep us apart — lines that are more than race or class". Chicago Tribune .
  19. "Combined Print & E-Book Nonfiction - Best Sellers". The New York Times . November 1, 2020. Retrieved October 22, 2020.
  20. N'Duka, Amanda (October 14, 2020). "Ava DuVernay Back In Director's Chair For 'Caste'; Netflix Adaptation Of Acclaimed Isabel Wilkerson's Best Seller". Deadline. Retrieved November 18, 2020.
  21. "Ms. Wilkerson And R. J. Watts Wed in Maryland". The New York Times. November 13, 1989 via NYTimes.com.
  22. "Isabel Wilkerson Family Husband And Children". showbizcorner.com.
  23. Wilkerson, Isabel (July 1, 2020). "America's Enduring Caste System". NYT Magazine. Retrieved July 15, 2020. As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power — which groups have it and which do not.
  24. "Isabel Wilkerson of The New York Times". pulitzer.org. 1994. Retrieved July 15, 2020. For her profile of a fourth-grader from Chicago's South Side and for two stories reporting on the Midwestern flood of 1993.
  25. "John Simon Guggenheim Foundation | Isabel Wilkerson" . Retrieved November 18, 2020.
  26. "Isabel Wilkerson". The National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved November 18, 2020.
  27. Pineda, Dorany (April 17, 2021). "Winners of the 2020 L.A. Times Book Prizes announced". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved April 17, 2021.
  28. Past Honorary Degree Recipients - Saint Paul
  29. "DePaul to Honor Array of Luminaries at 2011 Commencement Ceremonies".
  30. "Niagara University 2011".
  31. "Howard Alumna Isabel Wilkerson Receives Inaugural NYU/Axinn Foundation Prize".
  32. "2013: Pulitzer Prize Winner and Nobel Prize Winner Highlight Honorary Degree Recipients at Muhlenberg | Muhlenberg College" . Retrieved August 12, 2023.
  33. "Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson - SMU".
  34. "Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson is Commencement 2014 speaker, joining honorands John Seely Brown, Glenn Close and David Shaw". April 21, 2014.
  35. "Class of 2018 Celebrates Commencement | Middlebury News and Announcements". May 27, 2018.
  36. "Commencement Program 2022" (PDF). smith.edu. Retrieved August 12, 2023.
  37. "At Commencement, Students Empowered to Make Change - Colby News" . Retrieved August 12, 2023.
  38. "Isabel Wilkerson named Commencement speaker".
  39. "Isabel Wilkerson Addresses Class of 2023 at Commencement". May 26, 2023.