Isabel Wilkerson

Nonfiction

Interviewed by: Angela Elam

Our “Classics Series” continues with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson, whose 2020 book, Caste:The Origins of Our Discontents, found its beginnings in her debut book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migrationr.  Winner of several prizes, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for non-fiction, she discusses in 2011 writing her debut book that stems from over 1,200 interviews and chronicles the movement of African-Americans from the Jim Crow south to the urban North and West between 1915-1970. She reads passages from the book, including one that reveals her own family’s experience migrating north to uncertain futures and possibilities.

(Photo by Larry D. Moore CC BY-SA 3.0)