Berry College will host Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson for the Conson Wilson Lecture series at 7:30 p.m. on Sept. 20 in the College Chapel. Admission is free and open to the public.
Wilkerson, a journalist and bestselling author, spent 15 years interviewing more than 1,200 people and conducted extensive archival research to write her bestseller, “The Warmth of Other Suns”. The book tells of The Great Migration from World War I to the 1970s, when some six million black Americans fled the South for an uncertain existence in the urban North and West.
Her book won the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the 2011 Anisfield-Wolf Award for Nonfiction, the 2011 Hillman Book Prize, the 2011 Lynton History Prize from Harvard and Columbia universities, the 2011 Heartland Prize for Nonfiction, the Stephen Ambrose Oral History Prize, the Independent Literary Award for Nonfiction, the Horace Mann Bond Book Award from Harvard University, the NAACP Image Award for best literary debut and was shortlisted for the 2011 Pen-Galbraith Literary Award for Nonfiction and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.
Wilkerson won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for her work as Chicago Bureau Chief of The New York Times. She was the first black woman in the history of American journalism to win a Pulitzer and the first African-American to win for individual reporting.
She has lectured on narrative writing at the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University. She served as Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University and as the James M. Cox Jr. Professor at Emory University. She is currently Professor of Journalism and Director of Narrative Nonfiction at Boston University.
Wilkerson has spoken on the topics of migration, social justice, urban affairs and 20th Century history at universities across the country and in Europe. She has appeared on national news programs such as CBS 60 Minutes, NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross and NBC Nightly News.
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Prepared by Student Public Relations Assistant Katherine McDonald.