Join Isabel Wilkerson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal and author of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents and The Warmth of Other Suns, for a lecture exploring the layers of racialised injustice and violence across the American story from the foundations to the present. President Kelli Armstrong will facilitate a Q&A with the Salve community and Ms. Wilkerson following the lecture.

“Wilkerson’s work,” in the words of The American Prospect magazine, “is the missing puzzle piece of our country’s history.” The Warmth of Other Suns won the National Book Critics Circle Award, among other honors, and was named to more than 30 Best of the Year lists, including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker and The Washington Post. TIME Magazine named it one of the “10 Best Non-Fiction Books” of the decade. The New York Times Magazine named Warmth to its list of the best nonfiction books of all time.

Isabel Wilkerson. Photographed by Chrisean Rose for Vogue Magazine, February 2021

Her new book, Caste: The Origins of our Discontents, was published in August 2020 to critical acclaim and became a Number 1 New York Times bestseller. Dwight Garner of The New York Times called it, “An instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far.” Oprah Winfrey chose it as her 2020 Summer/Fall book club selection, declaring it “the most important book” she had ever selected.

Wilkerson won the Pulitzer Prize for her deeply humane narrative writing while serving 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 2016, President Barack Obama awarded Wilkerson the National Humanities Medal for “championing the stories of an unsung history.” As the historian Jill Lepore observed in The New Yorker: “What Wilkerson urges, isn’t argument at all; it’s compassion. Hush, and listen.”

Register to attend here

Header Image: Isabel Wilkerson. Credit: National Endowment for the Humanities