Author Isabel Wilkerson and "The Warmth of Other Suns"

Hosts Emma Jackson Ford, O.B. Hill  and Patricia Hill Welch talk with Pulitzer Prize winning author Isabel Wilkerson in this rebroadcast of their November 2010 interview.  Wilkerson discusses “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration,” a New York Times bestseller and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.

The Warmth of Other Suns tells the true story of three people among the six million who made the decision of their lives during the Great Migration, a watershed in American history. Wilkerson spent 15 years working on Warmth, interviewing more than 1,200 people to tell what she calls one of the greatest underreported stories of the 20th Century. In addition to the National Book Critics Circle Award, the book won the Heartland Prize for Nonfiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Award for Nonfiction, the Lynton History Prize from Harvard and Columbia universities, and the Stephen Ambrose Oral History Prize and was shortlisted for both the Pen-Galbraith Literary Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

Wilkerson won the Pulitzer Prize for her work as Chicago Bureau Chief of The New York Times in 1994, making 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 in the history of American journalism.  She is also a recipient of the National Humanities Medal.