Isabel Wilkerson
Isabel Wilkerson won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for her reporting as
Chicago bureau chief of the New York Times. The award made 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. She won the George Polk Award for her coverage of
the Midwest and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for her research into the Great
Migration. She has lectured on narrative writing at the Nieman Foundation at Harvard
University and has served as Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University and as
the James M. Cox Jr. Professor of Journalism at Emory University. She is currently Professor
of Journalism and Director of Narrative Nonfiction at Boston University. During the Great
Migration, her parents journeyed from Georgia and southern Virginia to Washington, DC,
where she was born and reared. THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS is her first book.