Pulitzer Prize and National Humanities Medal recipient Isabel Wilkerson will deliver the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s 10th annual Mossman Distinguished Lecture at 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 28, in the Student Union Auditorium. The lecture, “15 Years of Warmth: A Personal Reflection on the Enduring Power of the Great Migration,” is free and open to the public but reservations are recommended.
Wilkerson will look back on her 2010 bestseller “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration,” which combines individual narratives and social, political and cultural analysis to document the departure of six million African Americans from the American South between World War I and the 1970s. She’ll discuss why this history remains vital to understanding America today and explore what we can continue to learn from the courage and resilience of those who left everything behind in pursuit of a better life.
“The Warmth of Other Suns” received the National Book Critics Circle Award and was included in Time’s 10 Best Nonfiction Books of the Decade and The New York Times Magazine’s Best Nonfiction of All Time. Wilkerson received the Pulitzer in 1994 for her work while serving as Chicago bureau chief of The New York Times. Her most recent book, published in 2020, is “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.”
The Mossman Distinguished Lecture Series was created in 2015 and is made possible by an estate gift from the late Ken and Blaire Mossman, who met in Knoxville in 1968 while pursuing their degrees at UT.
In 2018, the university dedicated the Ken and Blaire Mossman Building in their honor. The building is designed for collaborative research and features the latest in teaching technology.
A book signing will follow the lecture.
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MEDIA CONTACT:
Stacy Estep (865-974-8304, sestep3@utk.edu)