Isabel Wilkerson

Isabel Wilkerson (born 1961) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist, and the author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration.

Born in Washington D.C. in 1961, she studied journalism at Howard University, becoming editor-in-chief of the college newspaper The Hilltop. During college, Wilkerson interned at many publications, including the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post.

In 1994, while 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. Several of Wilkerson's articles are included in the book Pulitzer Prize Feature Stories: America's Best Writing, 1979 - 2003, edited by David Garlock.

Wilkerson has won a George S. Polk Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Journalist of the Year award from the National Association of Black Journalists (1994).

She has also 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.

After fifteen years of research and writing, she published The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, 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 March 2011 the book won the National Book Critics Circle Award (Nonfiction). The book also won the Anisfield-Wolf Awardfor Nonfiction, the Mark Lynton History Prize, the Sidney Hillman Book Prize, the Heartland Prize for Nonfiction and was also the nonfiction runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize in 2011.

As of 2010, Wilkerson lived in the Virginia Highland neighborhood of Atlanta and, in a New York Times interview, remarked on being a part of a movement on the part of some African Americans to return to the South after generations in the North.

• 1993 George S. Polk Award for Regional Reporting, in The New York Times
• 1994 Pulitzer Prize in Journalism for Feature Writing
• 1994 Journalist of the Year award from the National Association of Black Journalists
• 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award (Nonfiction), winner, The Warmth of Other Suns
• 2011 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work Debut Author, nominated, The Warmth of Other Suns
• 2011 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, winner, The Warmth of Other Suns.