The Associates of the Boston Public Library's 2026 Literary spotLights features a conversation between Carole Simpson, Associates Board member, and Jodi Picoult, New York Times bestselling author. The Associates will be honoring Jodi Picoult as a Literary Light on April 26, 2026. To learn more, visit www.LiteraryLights.org
This interview was produced by Lorie Conway, Associates Board member and filmmaker, and filmed and edited by Patrick Cody.
Guest
Ilyon Woo
Ilyon Woo is the Pulitzer-Prize-winning, New York Times best-selling author of Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom. The book is one of the New York Times’s “10 Best Books of 2023” and People Magazine’s “Top Ten Books of 2023.” It was also named a best book of the year by The New Yorker, Time, NPR, Smithsonian Magazine, Boston, Chicago Public Library, and Oprah Daily.
Time Magazine called Master Slave Husband Wife an “edge-of-your-seat drama;” and The Wall Street Journal pronounced it: “A narrative of such courage and resourcefulness it seems too dashing to be true…. a “genuine nail-biter.” A finalist for a Kirkus Prize, the book was long-listed for the Carnegie Medal, nominated for the Goodreads Choice Awards, and supported by a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Writing Grant.
Ilyon 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, and she has received support for her research from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Antiquarian Society, among other institutions.
Ilyon has traveled the country to speak at bookstores, museums, schools, and book festivals, and she has been featured on such programs as NPR’s Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and CBS Sunday Morning. She holds a BA in the Humanities from Yale College and a PhD in English from Columbia University, where she first came upon the story of William and Ellen Craft.
In addition to participating in LITERARY spotLIGHTS, Woo is also being honored at this year's Literary Lights dinner.
Host: Christy Cashman
Author, actress, and producer, Christy Cashman has appeared in more than twenty films, including Kettle of Fish, The Love Guide and American Hustle, and recently launched YouthINK, a teen writing mentorship program.
The Truth About Horses is Cashman's first novel and she has also written two children’s books set in Ireland: The Not-So-Average Monkey of Kilkea Castle and Petri’s Next Things. When she’s not writing or working on production projects, Christy is most likely riding cross country through the countryside of New England or Ireland.
She lives with her husband, Jay; two sons, Jay Michael and Quinn; their three dogs, Ben, Lucy, and Dan; and three horses, Calvin, Butterscotch, and Victor. The family divides their time between Kilkea Castle in Ireland and their homes in Boston and Chatham, Massachusetts.
Cashman is a Director of the Associates of the Boston Public Library. She co-chaired Literary Lights 2022 and is co-chairing the dinner again in 2023.
PURCHASE BOOKS
Geraldine Brooks’ books can be purchased through the Harvard Bookstore
or checked out of the Boston Public Library
Past Literary Spotlights
Click below to expand each section and learn about our prior interviewees
Photo: Michael Wilson
The third LITERARY spotLIGHTS interview featured a conversation with Ilyon Woo<span">, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom. It premiered on May 14, 2025 and can be viewed on our YouTube channel.
Ilyon Woo is the Pulitzer-Prize-winning, New York Times best-selling author of Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom. The book is one of the New York Times’s “10 Best Books of 2023” and People Magazine’s “Top Ten Books of 2023.” It was also named a best book of the year by The New Yorker, Time, NPR, Smithsonian Magazine, Boston, Chicago Public Library, and Oprah Daily.
Time Magazine called Master Slave Husband Wife an “edge-of-your-seat drama;” and The Wall Street Journal pronounced it: “A narrative of such courage and resourcefulness it seems too dashing to be true…. a “genuine nail-biter.” A finalist for a Kirkus Prize, the book was long-listed for the Carnegie Medal, nominated for the Goodreads Choice Awards, and supported by a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Writing Grant.
Ilyon 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, and she has received support for her research from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Antiquarian Society, among other institutions.
Ilyon has traveled the country to speak at bookstores, museums, schools, and book festivals, and she has been featured on such programs as NPR’s Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and CBS Sunday Morning. She holds a BA in the Humanities from Yale College and a PhD in English from Columbia University, where she first came upon the story of William and Ellen Craft.
In addition to participating in LITERARY spotLIGHTS, Woo was also honored at the 2025 Literary Lights dinner.
BPL Anti-Slavery Collection
Ilyon researched her book, Master Slave Husband Wife, in the Boston Public Library's Special Collections. Over the last decade, the Associates of the Boston Public Library has funded the cataloging and digitization of many items in the BPL’s Anti-Slavery Collection, including rare handwritten correspondence. Check out some of the moving letters that provide personal insights about William and Ellen Craft's incredible journey that were essential to Ilyon's research.
Letter from William Craft to Samuel May, May 29th, 1860
Conservation before and after of The Underground Railroad, which was performed by Associates-funded Conservation Intern, Annie Ujifusa.
Ilyon Woo and Jay Moschella, BPL Curator of Rare Books, with the BPL's rare, first-edition copy of The Underground Railroad.
Letter from Emma Michell to Miss Weston, May 9th, 1851
Featured Book
Master Slave Husband Wife won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Biography. The Pulitzer Prize committee described the book as “A rich narrative of the Crafts, an enslaved couple who escaped from Georgia in 1848, with light-skinned Ellen disguised as a disabled white gentleman and William as her manservant, exploiting assumptions about race, class, and disability to hide in public on their journey to the North, where they became famous abolitionists while evading bounty hunters.”
In 1848, a year of 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, while sustained by their love as husband and wife, they made their escape together 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.
Along the way, they dodged slave traders, military officers, and even friends of their enslavers, who might have revealed their true identities. The tale of their adventure soon made them celebrities, and generated headlines around the country. Americans could not get enough of this charismatic young couple, who traveled another 1,000 miles criss-crossing New England, drawing thunderous applause as they spoke alongside some of the greatest abolitionist luminaries of the day—among them Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown.
But even then, they were not out of danger. With the passage of an infamous new Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, all Americans became accountable for returning refugees like the Crafts to slavery. Then yet another adventure began, as slave hunters came up from Georgia, forcing the Crafts to flee once again—this time from the United States, their lives and thousands more on the line and the stakes never higher.
With three epic journeys compressed into one monumental bid for freedom, Master Slave Husband Wife is an American love story—one that would challenge the nation’s core precepts of life, liberty, and justice for all—one that challenges us even now.
The second Literary Spotlights featured Geraldine Brooks in discussion with Christy Cashman. It premiered on June 8, 2022 and can be viewed on our YouTube channel.
Australian-born Geraldine Brooks is an author and journalist, best known for her novel March, which won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 2006. At the time of filming, her latest novel, Horse, was just about to be published.
She grew up in the Western suburbs of Sydney, attended the University of Sydney, and worked as a reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald. In 1982 she won the Greg Shackleton Australian News Correspondents scholarship to the journalism master’s program at Columbia University in New York City. Later she worked for The Wall Street Journal, where she covered crises in the the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans. In 1990, with her husband Tony Horwitz, she won the Overseas Press Club Award for best coverage of the Gulf War. The following year they received a citation for excellence for their series, “War and Peace.” In 2006 she was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University. She returned to Harvard as a Visiting Lecturer in 2021. Her novels People of the Book, Caleb’s Crossing and The Secret Chord all were New York Times best-sellers.
Her first novel, Year of Wonders is an international bestseller, translated into more than 25 languages and currently optioned for a limited series by Olivia Coleman’s production company. She is also the author of the nonfiction works Nine Parts of Desire, Foreign Correspondence, and The Idea of Home. Brooks married fellow journalist and author Tony Horwitz in Tourette-sur-Loup France in 1984 and were together until his sudden death in 2019. They have two sons, Nathaniel and Bizu. She lives on Martha’s Vineyard and spends as much time as she can in Australia. In 2016, she was named an Officer in the Order of Australia.
In addition to participating in LITERARY spotLIGHTS, Brooks also moderated a conversation with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. at the 2022 Literary Lights dinner.
The first Literary Spotlights featured Sy Montgomery in discussion with Christy Cashman. It premiered on May 12, 2021 and can be viewed on our YouTube channel.
Researching articles, films, and her thirty books for adults and children, nationally acclaimed naturalist and author Sy Montgomery has been chased by an angry silverback gorilla in Rwanda, hunted by a tiger in India, and swum with piranhas, electric eels and pink dolphins in the Amazon. Her work has taken her from the cloud forest of Papua New Guinea (for a book on tree kangaroos) to the Altai Mountains of the Gobi (for another on snow leopards). For the National Book Award Finalist The Soul of an Octopus, she befriended the cephalopods at the New England Aquarium, and scuba dived and snorkeled with wild octopuses in Mexico and French Polynesia. She also drew on her scuba skills for cage diving with great white sharks. In 2018, she published How to Be a Good Creature: A Memoir in Thirteen Animals, which reflects on the personalities and quirks of thirteen animals who have profoundly affected her. In 2021, she published The Hummingbirds' Gift: Wonder, Beauty, and Renewal on Wings, which recounts the story of nursing two hummingbirds back to health and returning them to the wild.
Born in Frankfurt, Germany, Montgomery grew up in Westfield, New Jersey and attended Syracuse University. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband, the writer Howard Mansfield, their border collie Thurber, and a flock of free-range laying hens.
The Associates honored Montgomery as a 2022 Literary Light.