Growing up in Washington, D.C., after her parents fled the Jim Crow South, Isabel Wilkerson felt like she was raised as the daughter of immigrants.

Her father, a civil engineer from Virginia, and her mother, a teacher from Georgia, held old world values from their former homelands where oppression was the everyday landscape and lynchings occurred every few days.

Education and a strict upbringing eventually became Wilkerson’s pathway to leaping over racial barriers to become the first Black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize and the first African American to win the...

GRAPEVINE — Throughout the hotel lobby, discussions of Freedom of Information Act requests, DNA evidence and FBI reports with missing paragraphs echoed in the hallways, noted Isabel Wilkerson. "What a bunch of narrative nonfiction nerds," Wilkerson joked during her keynote speech at the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference on Sunday. She, of course, also included herself in that category. For the eighth year, about 275 "nonfiction nerds" came to Grapevine to participate in what is known as one of the premier conferences of the genre, taking its name from its key benefactor Sue Mayborn, Killeen Daily Herald and Temple...