Isabel Wilkerson, the author of the award-winning The Warmth of Other Suns, is the recipient of the inaugural NYU/Axinn Foundation Prize, which recognizes distinguished work in literary narrative nonfiction. The honour includes a cash award of $100,000.
Isabel Wilkerson is the first African-American woman winner of the Pulitzer Prize for journalism. She is also the author of the critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller The Warmth of Other Suns. Her debut work won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and was named to Time’s 10 Best Nonfiction Books of the decade and to The New York Times’s list of the Best Nonfiction of All Time.
“The purpose of the award is to foster an excellent and influential writer’s continuing contributions to literature and culture,” says Susan Antón, Interim Dean of NYU’s Graduate School of Arts and Science (GSAS). “The idea is to encourage ongoing work by writers of important literary narrative nonfiction—to promote books that demonstrate originality of vision and depth of research, books that seek to deepen our understanding of the human condition and are of broad interest and appeal.”
The Warmth of Other Suns chronicles the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to other parts of the United States over the course of the 20th century. The Warmth of Other Suns received a National Book Critics Award as well as honours from the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Economist, the Boston Globe, and the Chicago Tribune, among others.
Wilkerson, who won the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing in 1994 while reporting for the New York Times and serving as its Chicago bureau chief, was the first African American woman to win the award in journalism. Her second book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, was published this summer. Caste, an Oprah Book Club selection, posits that racism in the United States reflects the sort of caste system that is also found in other countries.
Wilkerson, who has a bachelor’s degree from Howard University, has also won a Polk award, the Journalist of the Year Award from the National Association of Black Journalists, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.
We congratulate Isabel Wilkerson on winning this prestigious award. We are proud of you. Keep up the outstanding works.
This article was culled from Nyc News
