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ɬ�﷬ is honored to announce that , celebrated author, Pulitzer Prize winner, and National Humanities Medal recipient, will deliver the 2025 Commencement address. Wilkerson, a leading voice in narrative nonfiction, is known for her compelling interpretation of the human condition.

Wilkerson is the first African-American to win the Pulitzer Prize for individual reporting, work she did for the New York Times. �¾����������Dz�’s nonfiction book The Warmth of Other Suns has been widely acclaimed for its powerful storytelling of the Great Migration, earning multiple awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her latest book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, has further cemented her status as a preeminent thinker, examining the inner workings of an American hierarchy, which she calls “an artificial construction” and “a fixed and embedded ranking of human value” that spans race, class, and gender.

�¾����������Dz�’s The Warmth of Other Suns, published in 2010, was critically lauded. Based on more than 1,000 interviews, the book’s multifaceted presentation of migrant families’ experiences was lauded by the �ҳܲ����徱����’s Lettecha Johnson, who wrote, “The mass migration of African Americans out of the U.S. south forever changed the country’s cultural fabric – and �¾����������Dz�’s history of this period is full of sacrifice and hope.”

In the Times review of her second book, David Garner writes, “’Caste’ lands so firmly because the historian, the sociologist and the reporter are not at war with the essayist and the critic inside her.  This book has the reverberating and patriotic slap of the best American prose writing.”

ɬ�﷬ will host its outdoor Commencement ceremony on Central Campus at 10 a.m. on May 19, 2025. The ceremony will be available via livestream so all can join in the celebration of our graduates’ accomplishments.