THANK YOU TO OUR PRESENTING SPONSOR

The Minneapolis Foundation cultivates generosity by driving action for the greatest civic, social, and economic needs. We partner with nonprofits, facilitate grantmaking, drive research and advocacy, and provide services to donors seeking to make a difference.

THIS EVENT IS MADE POSSIBLE WITH PARTNERSHIP FROM:

Official Media Partner

Champion Sponsors

Partner Sponsors

Community Partner Sponsors

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • “An instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far.”

—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched, and beautifully written narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings.

Isabel Wilkerson won a Pulitzer Prize while reporting for the New York Times. Her first book, The Warmth of Other Suns, brought the underreported story of the Great Migration of the 20th century into the light, and she published her best-selling book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents in August 2020. Among many honors, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama.

Angela Davis

Host,

MPR News with Angela Davis

Angela Davis is the host of MPR News with Angela Davis, a weekday talk show that airs at 9 a.m. She joined MPR News in November 2018 after more than 25 years of television reporting and anchoring in the Twin Cities and other cities throughout the country. Davis leads conversations on a wide variety of topics including how the state is changing, Minnesota’s persistent racial disparities, economic issues, education and mental health. The program includes insight from experts as well as listeners who call in during the live broadcast.

Chanda Smith Baker is a board director and entrepreneurial philanthropic, nonprofit and community leader. An experienced CEO with proven success in leading complex organizations, Chanda is recognized for her strategic leadership, demonstrated success in turning under-performing organizations around and broad social impact. An award-winning podcaster and sought-after speaker, Chanda’s expertise in diversity, equity and inclusion is recognized nationally.

Chanda Smith Baker

Chief Impact Officer & SVP

Minneapolis Foundation

Isabel Wilkerson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal, is the author of The New York Times bestsellers The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. A gifted storyteller, Wilkerson captivates audiences with the universal human story of migration and reinvention, as well as the unseen hierarchies that have divided us as a nation, in order to find a way to transcend them.

She has become an impassioned voice for demonstrating how history can help us understand ourselves, our country and our current era of upheaval. In her writing, Wilkerson brings the invisible and the marginalized into the light and into our hearts. In her lectures, she explores with authority the need to reconcile America’s karmic racial inheritance — a notion she has expressed in her widely-shared Op-Ed essays in The New York Times.

Wilkerson captivates audiences with the universal story of migration and the enduring search for the American dream, the origins of our shared commonality. She draws a direct link between the leaderless revolution known as the Great Migration and the protest movements for social justice today, both of them responses to unacknowledged and unaddressed history.

The Warmth of Other Suns tells the true story of three people among the six million who made the decision of their lives during the Great Migration, a watershed in American history. Wilkerson spent 15 years working on Warmth, interviewing more than 1,200 people to tell what she calls one of the greatest underreported stories of the 20th Century. In addition to the National Book Critics Circle Award, the book won the Heartland Prize for Nonfiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Award for Nonfiction, the Lynton History Prize from Harvard and Columbia universities, and the Stephen Ambrose Oral History Prize and was shortlisted for both the Pen-Galbraith Literary Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

The Warmth of Other Suns became a New York Times and national bestseller. It was named to more than 30 Best of the Year lists, including The New York Times’ 10 Best Books of the Year, Amazon’s 5 Best Books of the Year, and Best of the Year lists in The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, among others. It made national news when President Obama chose the book for summer reading in 2011. In 2012, The New York Times Magazine named The Warmth of Other Suns to its list of the best nonfiction books of all time, and in 2019, TIME Magazine named it one of the “10 Best Non-Fiction Books” of the decade.

Isabel Wilkerson’s latest book, Caste: The Origins of our Discontents, published in August 2020 to critical acclaim, with Dwight Garner of The New York Times calling it, “An instant American classic” and Oprah choosing it for her monthly book club pick. Picked as a Time’s 2020 must-read book, the book examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America and shows how a hierarchy of social divisions still defines our lives today. Wilkerson brings the past’s complexities to vivid life through her passionate research and her profound gift for connecting with audiences of all backgrounds.

Wilkerson won the Pulitzer Prize for her work as Chicago Bureau Chief of The New York Times in 1994, making her the first Black woman in the history of American journalism to win a Pulitzer Prize and the first African-American to win for individual reporting in the history of American journalism.

She has lectured on narrative nonfiction at the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University and has taught at Princeton, Emory and Boston universities. She has lectured at more than 200 other colleges and universities across the United States, Europe and in Asia. Her work has garnered seven honorary degrees, most recently from Bates College and Southern Methodist University. She has appeared on national programs such as CBS’s 60 Minutes, NPR’s Fresh Air, NBC’s Nightly News, MSNBC, CNN, C-SPAN, and others.

In conferring Isabel Wilkerson the 2015 National Humanities Medal, the National Endowment for the Humanities honored her “for championing the stories of an unsung history. Her masterful combination of intimate human narratives with broader societal trends allows us to measure the epic migration of a people by its vast impact on our Nation and on each individual life.”

Follow Isabel Wilkerson

Cover Story: From Jan. 6 to Tyre Nichols, American Life Is Still Defined by Caste

'Caste' Author Isabel Wilkerson Will Change The Way You See The World

Is America Trapped in a Caste System?

'I Hope That We Are On The Cusp of an Awakening'

Oprah Just Launched a New Oprah's Book Club Podcast, Kicking Off With "Caste"

Isabel Wilkerson's World-Historical Theory of Race and Caste

America's Caste System

Americas 'untouchables': the silent power of the caste system

"Racism' Did Not Seem Sufficient.' Author Isabel Wilkerson on the American Caste System

America's Enduring Caste System

"The Heart Is the Last Frontier"

"A Writer's Long Journey to Trace the Great Migration"

THANK YOU TO OUR PRESENTING SPONSOR

The Minneapolis Foundation cultivates generosity by driving action for the greatest civic, social, and economic needs. We partner with nonprofits, facilitate grantmaking, drive research and advocacy, and provide services to donors seeking to make a difference.

THIS EVENT IS MADE POSSIBLE WITH PARTNERSHIP FROM:

Official Media Partner

Champion Sponsors

Partner Sponsors

Community Partner Sponsors

We at Teach For America Twin Cities know that educational equity will not be achieved in Minnesota without a cross-sector movement of educators, families, leaders, schools, and community partners. We are working towards an ambitious goal: by 2030, twice as many children in communities where we work in Minnesota will reach key educational milestones indicating they are on a path to economic mobility and a future filled with possibility. Join us as we commit to changing the landscape for our kids – bringing in and developing educators and school leaders, creating a new, more affordable pathway to teacher certification, and connecting our network to the expansive work of other educational leaders in the Twin Cities. Learn more about us on our website and read our FY23 annual report.