Ilyon Woo discusses her book “Master Slave Husband Wife”

Author and professor, Ilyon Woo discusses her latest book, Master Slave Husband Wife with PPL’s very own Brendon Barnes. MSHW is the remarkable true story of Ellen and William Craft, who escaped slavery through daring, determination, and disguise, with Ellen passing as a wealthy, disabled White man and William posing as “his” slave.

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.

Brendon Barnes is a writer and culture critic from central Florida who came to Maine in 2016 and to Portland Public Library in January of this year. His fiction has been published in Portland Review and Bayou Magazine. After earning his MFA, he started an online magazine called sinkhole with his grad school buddies that still hosts archives of his cultural criticism, reviews, and interviews with writers like Annie Hartnett and David Vann.

This event is brought in partnership with Back Cove Books