Isabel Wilkerson

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal, Isabel Wilkerson has become a leading figure in narrative nonfiction, an interpreter of the human condition, and an impassioned voice for demonstrating how history can help us understand ourselves, our country, and our current era of upheaval. Her debut work of narrative nonfiction, The Warmth of Other Suns, follows three young people on their perilous journey out of the Jim Crow South to the North and West – otherwise known as the Great Migration. Her second book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, defines eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, heredity, and dehumanization. She documents the parallels with two other hierarchies in history, those of India and of Nazi Germany.  No reader will be left without a greater understanding of the price we all pay in a society torn by artificial divisions. On February 17, 2023, Isabel Wilkerson came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco for an onstage conversation with john a. powell.  powell is the Director of the Othering & Belonging Institute and a Professor of Law at UC Berkeley. Previously, Professor powell founded and directed the Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota, and was National Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union.