"My brother killed Abraham Lincoln. That is my weight, my shame. While he remained at large, I was held captive in my home. I should have told the soldiers who came with guns drawn and bayonets at the ready this true thing: I might have stopped him, for I harbored him and kept his secrets. I was a pie safe locked tight and guilty as he." Asia Booth Clarke was twenty-nine years old and pregnant when Union soldiers and Federal detectives stormed her Philadelphia home in search of her assassin-brother. John Wilkes Booth's older sister had grown up in one of America's most notoriously troubled but spectacularly acclaimed acting families. "Johnny" and Edwin, her handsome brothers, were the matinee idols of the era. When John Wilkes Booth's crime left the nation in furious mourning and the Booth family under a dark cloud of accusation, it was Asia who bore the brunt. Booth's Sister was inspired by Asia Booth Clarke's personal memoirs. Author, Civil War scholar and storyteller Jane Singer has masterfully imagined the family dynamics and intimate dilemmas that led to one of America's most fateful crimes and left a sister's life in shambles.
Jane is a Civil War scholar and author of Booth's Sister, a novel about the reckless, enchanted and tragic life of Asia Booth,the sister of Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth.(Belle Bridge Books, August, 2008)
Her nonfiction work, The Confederate Dirty War: Arson, Bombings, Assassination and Plots for Chemical and Germ Attacks Against the Union was published by McFarland & Company in August of 2005. In November of 2006, the History Channel based a two-hour special called Civil War Terror on her book. She was both the historical consultant for the project as well as the primary on screen narrator. Her writing has been featured in the Washington Post Magazine (The Fiend in Gray), The Washington Times (Felix Stidger and the Sons of Liberty). Her research and discovery of Stidger; a little-known American hero, were illuminated in a Chicago Sun-Times article. Singer is a member of The Author's Guild, Pen West and The American Historical Association. She is also a professional actor, voice-over artist, narrator and lecturer. Born and raised in Falls Church, Virginia, she now lives in Los Angeles, California, and is available to speak to various groups across the country about her writing.
She has recently written, produced and directed Green Zone Blues: Voices of War; a series of voices of ordinary men and women caught in the crosshairs of our troubled times. A CD of the production will soon be available.
