Isabel Wilkerson
Isabel Wilkerson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and bestselling author, spent 15 years interviewing more than 1,200 people to write The Warmth of Other Suns, her award-winning work of narrative nonfiction that tells the epic story of three people who made the decision of their lives in what came to be known as the Great Migration. The book became a New York Times and national bestseller and has won numerous awards including It won the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and the 2011 Lynton History Prize from Harvard and Columbia universities, among many others. Wilkerson won the Pulitzer Prize for her work as Chicago Bureau Chief of The New York Times in 1994, making her the first black woman in the history of American journalism to win a Pulitzer Prize and the first African-American to win for individual reporting in the history of American journalism. She is currently Professor of Journalism and Director of Narrative Nonfiction at Boston University.