Diane McWhorter

Who is Diane McWhorter?

Rebecca Diane McWhorter is an American journalist, commentator and author who has written extensively about race and the history of civil rights. Her book, Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize in 2002. She is also the author of A Dream of Freedom, a young adult history of the civil rights movement. She is a long-time contributor to The New York Times and has written for the op-ed page of USA TODAY, Slate, and many other publications. McWhorter is a member of the Board of Contributors for USA TODAY's Forum Page, part of the newspaper’s Opinion section. She is originally from Birmingham, Alabama and now lives in New York City with her two children Isabel and Lucy.

She graduated from Wellesley College in 1974, after attending The Brooke Hill School in Birmingham.

Diane McWhorter is a Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany, for Fall 2007.