The Library to Host Ilyon Woo, New York Times bestselling author

Cambridge, MA - The Library will welcome Ilyon Woo, The New York Times bestselling author of Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom, for a discussion of her latest book at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, June 21. Woo will be talking with Dr. Myisha Eatmon, an assistant professor in African and African American Studies and History at Harvard University. The program is funded by the Cambridge Public Library Foundation.

In 1848, a year characterized by international democratic revolt, a young, enslaved couple, Ellen and William Craft, achieved one of the boldest feats of self-emancipation in American history. Posing as master and slave, sustained by their love as husband and wife, the Crafts made their escape across more than 1,000 miles, riding out in the open on steamboats, carriages, and trains that took them from bondage in Georgia to the free states of the North. Master Slave Husband Wife is the true story of the Crafts’ long journey, as they traveled another 1,000 miles on the abolitionist lecture circuit. They escaped slave hunters, following the passage of an infamous new Fugitive Slave Law, and were forced to flee again, this time from the United States.

Ilyon Woo’s writing has appeared in The Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, and The New York Times. She holds a B.A. in the humanities from Yale College and a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University.

Dr. Myisha S. Eatmon holds a B.A. in political science and history from the University of Notre Dame, an M.A. in U.S, history and a Ph.D. in U.S., African American, and legal history from Northwestern University. Dr. Eatmon is the author of “Fighting Back: Black Civil Litigation for White-on-Black Violence under Nineteenth, Twentieth, and Twenty-First Century Jim Crow,” in The Civil War Era and the Summer of 2020: Race, Violence, Resistance and Memory in the United States, edited by Hilary Green and Andrew Slap. Registration is required to participate in this program.