Presidential Plenary [presented in person]

Isabel Wilkerson

Isabel Wilkerson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal, is a leading light in this time of uncertainty and is the author of the critically acclaimed New York Times bestsellers The Warmth of Other Suns, and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.

"Wilkerson's work", in the words of The American Prospect, "is the missing puzzle piece of our country's history."

The Warmth of Other Suns won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named to more than 30 Best of the Year lists, including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post. In 2024, The New York Times named it one of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, ranking it the No. 1 Nonfiction Book -- and No. 2 among all books published this century.

Her latest book, Caste, became a No. 1 New York Times bestseller and was named Nonfiction Book of the Year by Time Magazine. Oprah Winfrey, in choosing it for her book club in the summer of 2020, declared it the most important book she had ever selected.

Wilkerson won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for her deeply humane narrative writing while serving 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 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."

This session is sponsored by Platinum Sponsor University of Washington, School of Social Work.