Ilyon Woo

Ilyon Woo is the author of Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom andThe Great Divorce: A Nineteenth-Century Mother’s Extraordinary Fight Against Her Husband, the Shakers, and Her Times. She has written for The Boston Globe and The Wall Street Journal, and received support for her research from the Whiting Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities, among other organizations. She holds a BA in the Humanities from Yale College and a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University. She also held a Peterson Fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society in 2004 where she conducted research for The Great Divorce. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in biography in 2024 for her book Master Slave Husband Wife (2023).