Isabel Wilkerson on leave from BU while she promotes book
The enormous success of “The Warmth of Other Suns’’ has been very good for its author, Isabel Wilkerson, but not so great for her students at Boston University. Because she’s so busy promoting the critically-acclaimed book, Wilkerson has managed to miss most of the semester – she began canceling classes two weeks into the semester – and is now on unpaid leave through 2012. “This transcends your normal book, yes,’’ Bill McKeen, chairman of the journalism department at BU, told us yesterday. “But if this was going to be a problem, why didn’t I find out in July when (Wilkerson) was assigned to teach the class. This came as a surprise to the students and to me.’’ A former Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times, Wilkerson joined the BU faculty in 2009, teaching journalism and narrative nonfiction. “The Warmth of Other Suns,’’ about the epic migration of blacks fleeing the south, was published the next year and became a bestseller. In an email to us yesterday, Wilkerson had this to say: “I deeply value my affiliation and teaching position at Boston University. The situation stemmed from a miscommunication about an internal logistics issue that ideally would not have happened. And I feel empathy for students who were inadvertently caught up in an internal logistics issue. To forestall potential scheduling issues, I am taking a leave of absence in spring 2012.’’ McKeen, who’s written several books, including “Mile Marker Zero,’’ acknowledged that scheduling promotional tours can be complicated for writers who also teach. This time, he said, it didn’t work well for students.
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