Author Isabel Wilkerson and MPR host Stephen Smith talk at the University of St Thomas. Photo by Rohan Preston.

Isabel Wilkerson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and acclaimed author of "The Warmth of Other Suns," signed books for an-hour-and-a-half Thursday evening at the University of St Thomas in St Paul.

Wilkerson was patient and festive as she autographed her celebrated work about the Great Migration of African-Americans from the South to the North in the 20th-century.

A Pulitzer Prize winner on leave from the New York Times, Wilkerson was interviewed onstage by Minnesota Public Radio's Stephen Smith in St Thomas' O'Shaughnessy Auditorium.

Wilkerson was witty and lucid, onstage and off. The Great Migration involved six million people in the 20th-century, she said, as contrasted with the 300,000 whose movements John Steinbeck, another journalist-turned-author, wrote about during the Dust Bowl.

She read excerpts from "Warmth," and tied the migration, and its many cultural ramifications, together in neat, sometimes deeply local ways. For example, she noted that the entire oeuvre of playwright August Wilson are Great Migration stories -- stories of displacement and refuge, of seeking to move from hurt to haven.

Thursday's talk, recorded for later broadcast, and signing were part of the capstone events that St. Thomas declared unofficially as Isabel Wilkerson Month. There have been reading groups and discussions of her work as well as the epic migration she so majestically captures.

Kristie Bunton, interim associate dean at St Thomas, beamed as she recalled how the book was given to the entire liberal arts faculty.

Wilkerson's schedule remains full. On Friday, she keynotes a benefit for ThreeSixty Journalism, a program that develops journalists of color.

The events allowed Wilkerson to reconnect with longtime friends, including Bill Woodson, assistant dean at St Thomas' business school. The audience also included judge Tanya Bransford and members of her book club, insurance agent and philanthropist David Maggitt and his wife, Stephanie, and retired Macalester historian Mahmoud El-Kati.