First Draft - Ilyon Woo

First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing

Ilyon Woo is the is the New York Times best-selling author of Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom, one of the New York Times’s “10 Best Books of 2023” and People Magazine’s “Top Ten Books of 2023. Woo is also the author of 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, Time Magazine, and The New York Times. She has a PhD in English from Columbia University.

We talked about the unfathomable but real cruelty of slavery, institutional slavery as the foundation for the building of this country, the indelible spirits of Ellen and William Craft, researching and brining historic events to life in creative non-fiction, the fugitive slave act, how cinema influences her writing, and writing vows.

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