Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson will deliver this year’s Allison Davis Lecture on Nov. 7 in Harris Hall.
Wilkerson was the first black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism, in recognition of her coverage of the 1994 Midwest floods and a profile of a 10-year-old boy growing up in Chicago. Wilkerson, the former Chicago bureau chief of The New York Times, has also won a George S. Polk Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
In 1994, she was named Journalist of the Year by the National Association of Black Journalists.
Wilkerson’s 2010 book, “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration,” discussed the migration of black Americans from the South to the North and West and has received critical acclaim, including being named as one of the best books of 2010 by The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the New Yorker, The Washington Post and the Economist. In 2011, she won the Anisfield-Wolf Award for Nonfiction, the Sidney Hillman Book Prize and the Heartland Prize for Nonfiction.
The Allison Davis Lectures were established by the Judd A. and Marjorie Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and department of African American studies in honor of educator, anthropologist, writer and scholar Allison Davis, the first black woman to receive tenure outside a non-historically black college.
Past Davis lecturers have included William Julius Wilson, Johnnetta Cole (Weinberg ’59, Ph.D. ’67), Mary Frances Berry, Randall Kennedy, Barbara Savage and Vijay Prashad.
— Amy Whyte
