If you haven’t read Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, I highly recommend this book.  As I read it, I couldn’t help but think of my own ancestors who left Surry County, NC for Pittsburgh, PA; Wytheville, VA for Newark, NJ, seeking better lives for themselves and their children. This book tells the how, the why, the tales of those left behind and those who picked up and left.  I couldn’t help but think that many of us have living relatives now who lived this history, yet it remains unspoken. Please talk to your elders and hear their stories. Write them down! And if you are able, please come hear this wonderful author and scholar in her own words. LINK

Isabel Wilkerson is the first African American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in the history of American journalism. She is the author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, a New York Times and international best seller. In writing on the great migration, Wilkerson used the story of her parents’ migration to fuel her fifteen years of extensive research. The result was, according to Tom Brokaw, “an epic for all Americans who want to understand the making of our modern nation.” John Stauffer of the Wall Street Journal claims that “The Warmth of Other Sunsis a brilliant and stirring epic. . . . [Ms. Wilkerson] humanizes history, giving it emotional and psychological depth.” The Warmth of Other Suns was a National Book Critics Circle Award Winner and named one of the best books of the year according to the New York Times, The New Yorker, and theBoston Globe, among many others.

• Date: Thu. Feb. 20, 2014
• Time: 7:00pm-8:00pm
• Location: Belk Centrum
  Lenoir-Rhyne University
  625 7th Avenue NE
  Hickory, N.C. 28601