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Isabel Wilkerson biography

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Isabel  Wilkerson
Photo: © Joe Henson

Isabel Wilkerson

Isabel Wilkerson Biography

Isabel Wilkerson is a journalist and author. Born in 1961, Wilkerson studied journalism at Howard University/ She is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal, and is a leading figure in narrative nonfiction.

Her debut novel was the critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller The Warmth of Other Suns, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and was named to Time's 10 Best Nonfiction Books of the 2010s and The New York Times's list of the Best Nonfiction of All Time.

A native of Washington, D.C., and a daughter of the Great Migration, the mass movement that she would go on to write about. 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. She then devoted fifteen years and interviewed more than 1,200 people to tell the story of the six million people, among them her parents, who defected from the Jim Crow South.

Wilkerson has taught at Princeton, Emory, and Boston Universities and has lectured at more than two hundred other colleges and universities across the United States and in Europe and Asia.

Isabel Wilkerson's website

This bio was last updated on 10/03/2020. In a perfect world, we would like to keep all of BookBrowse's biographies up to date, but with many thousands of lives to keep track of it's simply impossible to do. So, if the date of this bio is not recent, you may wish to do an internet search for a more current source, such as the author's website or social media presence. If you are the author or publisher and would like us to update this biography, send the complete text and we will replace the old with the new.

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Books by this Author

Books by Isabel Wilkerson at BookBrowse
Caste jacket
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Read-Alikes

All the books below are recommended as read-alikes for Isabel Wilkerson but some maybe more relevant to you than others depending on which books by the author you have read and enjoyed. So look for the suggested read-alikes by title linked on the right.
How we choose read-alikes

  • Ta-Nehisi Coates

    Ta-Nehisi Coates

    Ta-Nehisi Coates is a distinguished writer in residence at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He is a former staff writer at The Village Voice and Time and has contributed to The New York Times Magazine, The ... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    Caste

    Try:
    Between the World and Me
    by Ta-Nehisi Coates

  • Ibram X. Kendi

    Ibram X. Kendi

    Dr. Ibram X. Kendi is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University and the founding director of the BU Center for Antiracist Research. He is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a CBS News racial... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    Caste

    Try:
    How to Be an Antiracist
    by Ibram X. Kendi

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