Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson will present a lecture on the subject of her much heralded recent book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, at UVM’s Ira Allen Chapel on Wednesday, Oct. 5 at 5 p.m.

The event is free and open to the public. 

Wilkerson, it was just announced, will be awarded the 2015 National Humanities Medal at a special White House ceremony presided over by President Obama on Thursday, Sept. 22.

To this day we barely understand the full impact of the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities in search of a better life. This migration, driven not by one single leader but by six million Americans seeking political asylum in their own country, reshaped culture and politics, North and South, and set in motion the current racial challenges and disparities we now face as a country.

The Warmth of Other Suns was named one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review, one of the Five Best Books of the Year by Amazon and made the Best of the Year lists of The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Economist, The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Newsday, Entertainment Weekly, O Magazine, Publishers Weekly and more than dozen others. The New York Times Magazine named Warmth to its list of the All-Time Best Books of Nonfiction.

The book made news around the world when President Obama chose Warmth for his summer reading on Martha’s Vineyard in 2011.

Wilkerson’s talk at UVM is sponsored by the University of Vermont Office of the President and by the Vermont Humanities Council. The talk culminates the Vermont Humanities Council’s yearlong celebration, with state humanities councils nationwide, of 100 years of the Pulitzer Prize and is also the kickoff for the Council’s popular “First Wednesdays” lecture series that takes place at libraries across Vermont.

More information is available on the Office of the President's website and on the Vermont Humanities Council website.