When actress Jennifer Goran showed me a picture of her mother, I was immediately struck by the uncanny resemblance to Ellen Craft, heroine of my new novel, The Vanishing Woman. This amazing similarity was confirmation that Jenny is the right person to play the part of...
To many abolitionists, the Ohio River was the North's Jordan River, providing access to the Promised Land. The Ohio River was the dividing line between North and South, making it an important crossing point for escaped slaves in the Underground Railroad. It is also...
In a little over a week, I will be returning to the museum that altered my writing career and led to my passion--writing historical novels. On Saturday, November 17, at 1 p.m., I will be speaking about Henry "Box" Brown and Ellen Craft at the National Underground...
In the opening scene of my novel, The Disappearing Man, Henry Brown is running for his life from slave patrollers in the middle of the night on the streets of Richmond. He winds up hiding behind a monument at a church, on which are inscribed 72 names. Those 72 people...
My new novel, The Vanishing Woman, has just come off the press--although I haven't received my copies just yet. The Vanishing Woman is based on the incredible true story of Ellen Craft, a light-skinned slave who escaped in 1848 by posing as a white man. She couldn't...
First, the East Germans tried to kill the Church of Reconciliation by surrounding it with walls, barbed wire, and booby traps. Then they blew it up. But the church lives on today with the newly constructed Chapel of Reconciliation. When the Berlin Wall went up in...
Okay, so the Berlin Wall in my living room doesn't quite match the real Wall's dimensions. But it comes close. The last generation of the Wall before it came down on November 9, 1989, stood about 12 feet tall, which is a bit too much for my living room. My replica of...
What in the world does the University of Illinois have to do with REO Speedwagon, Dan Fogelberg, Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven," Billboard magazine's most powerful person in music, and the most prolific Grammy-winner living today? You can find out in a cover...
BBC Radio 4 ran a compelling show last Friday about The Stasi Jigsaw Puzzle--the shredded documents that form the core of my novel, The Puzzle People. As the Berlin Wall was coming down so dramatically in 1989, East German secret police, the Stasi, began shredding...