Katy Morlas Shannon is a tenth-generation Louisiana native. She received her master’s degree in History from Louisiana State University in 2005. She has dedicated her career as a professional historian to uncovering the stories of enslaved people. She was instrumental in the early stages of research for Whitney Plantation and created a searchable online database of over 400 enslaved individuals at Evergreen Plantation along with biographies of enslaved people for the plantation's website. Currently she is the historian at Laura Plantation, where she co-curated an exhibit about the plantation's enslaved community. Her non-fiction biography Antoine of Oak Alley: The Unlikely Origin of Pecans and the Enslaved Gardener Who Cultivated Them was published in November 2021 and received the Phillis Wheatley Award for the best biography of 2022 from the Sons and Daughters of the Middle Passage.
