Isabel Wilkerson is an African-American journalist and the author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (2010) and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020). She is the first woman of African-American heritage to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism.

Wilkerson was the editor-in-chief of the Howard University college newspaper, interned at the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post, and became the Chicago Bureau Chief of The New York Times. She also taught at Emory University, Princeton University, Northwestern University, and Boston University.

Wilkerson interviewed more than a thousand people for The Warmth of Other Suns (2010), which documents the stories of African Americans who migrated to northern and western cities during the 20th century. Her 2020 book Caste describes the racial hierarchy in the United States as a caste system. Both books were best-sellers.