Join us for a lecture by Isabel Wilkerson, National Humanities Medalist and author of the Pulitzer Prize winning book The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.

A gifted storyteller, Ms. Wilkerson captivates audiences with the universal story of migration and the enduring search for the American dream, the origins of our shared commonality. She draws a direct link between the leaderless revolution known as the Great Migration and the protest movements for social justice today, both of them responses to unacknowledged and unaddressed history.

Ms. Wilkerson has become an impassioned voice for demonstrating how history can help us understand ourselves, our country and our current era of upheaval. In her writing, Wilkerson brings the invisible and the marginalized into the light and into our hearts. In her lectures, she explores with authority the need to reconcile America’s karmic racial inheritance – a notion she has expressed in her widely shared Op-Ed essays in The New York Times.

Following her lecture, Ms. Wilkerson will participate in a short Q&A with the audience and be available to sign copies of her book, copies of which will also be for sale.

This program is presented in conjunction with MAD’s current exhibitions Derrick Adams: Sanctuary, La Frontera: Encounters Along the Border, and Tanya Aguiñiga: Craft & Care, all of which deal with themes of migration, travel, safety and borders. 

About the Author

Pulitzer Prize winner and National Humanities Medalist Isabel Wilkerson is the author of The New York Times bestseller The Warmth of Other Suns. Wilkerson spent 15 years working on Warmth, interviewing more than 1,200 people to tell one of the greatest underreported stories of the 20th Century, that of The Great Migration. In addition to the National Book Critics Circle Award, her book has 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. 

The Warmth of Other Suns was named to more than 30 Best of the Year lists, including The New York Times’ 10 Best Books of the Year, Amazon’s 5 Best Books of the Year, and Best of the Year lists in The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, among others. It made national news when President Obama chose the book for summer reading in 2011. In 2012, The New York Times Magazine named Warmth to its list of the best nonfiction books of all time. 

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.