Dear Festival Friends,

Early in her Pulitzer Prize–winning book Caste, Isabel Wilkerson compares America to an old house: beautiful but with a shaky foundation and lots of cracks in the walls. Though the damage might have occurred before our time, it’s on us to make repairs and stop further deterioration.

Six years after Caste was released, our American house continues to totter, and the book is more relevant than ever. It explores our country’s four-hundred-year-old system of ranking people according to their perceived worth and draws comparisons to two other societies built on hierarchy: India and Nazi Germany. Using stories of real people—including herself—Wilkerson shows how caste continues to infect our lives long after the system was theoretically dismantled in the wake of the Jim Crow era. In addition to winning the Pulitzer, it was an Oprah’s Book Club pick and named one of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century by New York Times readers.

“It’s an extraordinary document, one that strikes me as an instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far,” wrote Dwight Garner in his Times review. “It made the back of my neck prickle from its first pages, and that feeling never went away.”

It’s a remarkable achievement to have written one of the most influential books of the century. Wilkerson has written two of them. Her debut book, The Warmth of Other Suns, follows the lives of three African Americans who left the Jim Crow South as part of the Great Migration, a mass relocation that lasted from World War I to the 1970s and changed the social, cultural, and political landscape of the United States.

Wilkerson transformed this underreported story into a rich chronicle that has the pace, feel, and emotional heft of a novel. It won a National Book Critics Circle Award, was ranked second among the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century by New York Times critics, and was one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2011. He called its contribution to American history “magisterial.”

Two seminal books and two Pulitzer Prizes: Years before receiving the award for Caste, Wilkerson became the first Black American journalist to win the Pulitzer for individual reporting, in 1994, when she was Chicago bureau chief of The New York Times. How has she worked at such a high level for so many years? “I get up every day inspired by what my ancestors endured,” she has said, “seeking to honor their sacrifices, and dedicated to a mission of shedding light on unseen truths about ourselves and our country.”

It’s our great honor to have Wilkerson kick off the Festival with us on Friday, May 15. Whether or not you have tickets to her event, do yourself a favor and read (or reread) one of her books. It’s a small but meaningful way to help fortify the nation’s house we all share.

COMMUNITY NEWS

Congratulations to former U.S. poet laureate Ada Limón on the release of her new book, Against Breaking: On the Power of Poetry. She will be discussing this work—and signing copies!—at the Festival next month. 

Throughout April and May, the Festival is hosting, with Santa Fe’s Sky Cinemas, a series of films featuring the work of 2026 Festival authors. The series begins on Wednesday, April 15, with Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, based on the iconic book by Judy Blume and starring Rachel McAdams and Kathy Bates. Future films include Groundhog Day, written by Danny Rubin, and No Straight Lines, featuring cartoonist Alison Bechdel. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret plays at 6:30 at Sky Cinemas in the Railyard. Click here for more info.

Board of Directors
Edward Gale, Chair

Janet Bailey | Juliet Erickson

Andrea Fellows Fineberg | Jenny Kimball

James McGrath Morris | Carmella Padilla

Jenna Scanlan | Mary Sloane

Maria Gale, Ex Officio

Founders
Clare Hertel | Carmella Padilla | Mark Bryant