Wilkerson is a professor of journalism at Boston University; she won a Pulitzer Prize for her work as a journalist. "Other Suns," a sweeping look at the massive migration of African-American families from the South to the North during the 20th century, is her first book. In the New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote that Wilkerson "has pulled off an all but impossible feat. She has documented the sweeping 55-year-long migration of black Americans across their own country. She has challenged the dismissive assumptions that are sometimes made about that migration, treating it as a briefer and more easily explained event."