Wellesley, Mass.—Journalist and bestselling author Isabel Wilkerson—whose boundary-breaking nonfiction writing has earned her both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal—will deliver the address at Wellesley College’s 147th commencement ceremony on Friday, May 16.
The event will take place at 10:30 a.m. on the Wellesley College campus, and it will be livestreamed on the Wellesley Live website.
Wilkerson is the author of two critically acclaimed New York Times bestsellers—The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents—that document the universal human story of migration and reinvention, as well as the unseen hierarchies that have divided us as a nation. Writing in the American Prospect, Kristen Doerer said Wilkerson’s work is “the missing puzzle piece of our country’s history.”
“Isabel Wilkerson is one of our nation’s truly outstanding writers,” said Wellesley College President Paula A. Johnson. “She brings history to life, shedding light on how the past informs the present, and helping us understand the complex history that shapes our current moment.”
Wilkerson spent 15 years working on her 2010 book, The Warmth of Other Suns, interviewing more than 1,200 people to reveal what she calls one of the greatest underreported stories of the 20th century. The book won numerous awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Heartland Prize for Nonfiction, and the Lynton History Prize.
Wilkerson’s most recent book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, was published in 2020 to critical acclaim. The book examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America, demonstrating how a hierarchy of division still defines our society and our lives today. Caste won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was longlisted for the National Book Award.
Wilkerson won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for her deeply humane narrative writing as Chicago bureau chief of the New York Times, making her the first Black woman in the history of American journalism to win a Pulitzer Prize and the first Black journalist to win for individual reporting. In 2016, President Barack Obama awarded Wilkerson the National Humanities Medal for “championing the stories of an unsung history.”
A graduate of Howard University, Wilkerson has lectured on narrative nonfiction at Harvard University and has taught at Princeton, Emory, and Boston universities. She has spoken at colleges and universities across the world, and frequently appears on national programs such as CBS’s 60 Minutes, NPR’s Fresh Air, and NBC’s Nightly News, among others.