Ilyon Woo is a New York Times best-selling author, whose writing has appeared in the Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, and The New York Times. She is the author of two books, each of which combines history and biography, based on painstaking research and employing a novelistic, narrative writing style. Her first book, The Great Divorce: A Nineteenth-Century Mother’s Extraordinary Fight Against Her Husband, the Shakers, and Her Times, was published in 2010. This interview focuses on her recent book, Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom, which subsequently was selected by the New York Times as one of the ten best books of 2023.

Recorded 8/22/23.