UM-Flint's Critical Issues Forum Presents Journalist Isabel Wilkerson

The Frances Willson Thompson Critical Issues Forum (CIF) has established a tradition of bringing some of the country's finest minds to Flint. The 2012 edition continues that tradition.

Leading off the series on Tuesday, March 6, is prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson. Her topic is "Reinventing Society Through Migration." She spent 15 years and interviewed more than 1,200 people for The Warmth of Other Suns, a work of narrative nonfiction that tells the epic story of three people who made the decision of their lives in what came to be known as the Great Migration. The Warmth of Other Suns became a New York Times and national best seller. It won the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, as well as many other awards.

New to CIF this year are the Sullenger Dialogues, special morning sessions with each speaker open to the campus and community. The event is free and will be held at 10 a.m. in the Michigan Rooms, University Center. This session is sponsored by the Center for Civil Justice, UM-Flint Africana Studies Department, History Department, and Anthropology, Sociology, and Criminal Justice Department.

2012 Critical Issues Forum:

March 21: Author of The Elegant Universe, Brian Greene is one of the world's leading theoretical physicists.

March 29: The battle over water is the life's work of Maude Barlow, a leading advocate for water rights.

April 3: Cary Nelson is known not only as a blunt and devastatingly witty commentator on higher education but also as an activist working hard to reform it.

April 11: Nate Silver is a math genius and celebrated baseball statistician whose uncannily accurate Presidential election forecasts have shaken up the world of political polling.

April 26: William McDonough is an internationally renowned designer and one of the primary proponents and shapers of what he and his partners call "The Next Industrial Revolution."