Ilyon Woo is the New York Times best-selling author of Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom and The Great Divorce: A Nineteenth-Century Mother’s Extraordinary Fight Against Her Husband, the Shakers, and Her Times. Her writing has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, and Time Magazine, and she has received support for her research from the Whiting Foundation, and National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Antiquarian Society, among other institutions. She holds a BA in the Humanities from Yale College and a PhD in English from Columbia University.
Photo: Michael Wilson
American history would be everyone’s favorite subject if more historians wrote like this. Woo is a writer to watch.”
Pulitzer Prize-winning author of MADAM: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age
—Debby Applegate
ILYON WOO 