The Ballad of the Fugitive William Parker: A True Tale of Love, Murder, Treason, and Ordinary Folks Who Saved America by Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz
Published: September
8, 2026 by Simon & Schuster
Genre:
Non-fiction, Biography
The year, 1851. The place, a Quaker farming community turned Underground Railroad stronghold, where a Maryland enslaver had journeyed in pursuit of four men who’d fled his plantation years before. In a few hours, he’d be dead… and twenty-seven men from the village of Christiana would be rounded up and put on trial. Not for his murder, but for treason—for waging war against the United States, at a time when it was a crime against the government to obstruct an enslaver looking to reclaim his ‘property.’
This is story of what happened in Christiana that September morning—and in the ensuing ‘trial of the century,’ which saw the president himself advise the prosecution on strategy and a sitting congressman serve as lead attorney for the defense. But The Ballad of the Fugitive William Parker is also a much larger tale, one spanning decades, following a whole startlingly diverse community of abolitionists in their fight to convince their fellow Americans of the subversive idea that now found itself on that the nation ought to live up the ideals it was founded on, and respect all men as equals.
It’s a story that whisks readers from the quiet farmlands of Lancaster County—where a self-emancipated man named William Parker, whom legend had it bullets could not kill, rallied his neighbors to ride out each night to battle the slavecatchers who stalked their countryside—to Philadelphia’s genteel Society Hill, where socialite Harriet Forten Purvis had the ear of the mayor (and a cellar filled with fugitives). It’s stylish, propulsive, intimately human tale of bravery, ingenuity, and hope—and of ordinary people with little in common who came together to stand against injustice… and won.
Purchase your own copy on Amazon
Her previous nonfiction book, Dr Mutter’s Marvels: A True Tale of Intrigue and Innovation at the Dawn of Modern Medicine, spent three months on the New York Times best seller list, and screenplays based on the book has won awards at the Philadelphia Film Festival, Hamptons International Film Festival, the Sloan Foundation, and the Black List. Her first nonfiction book, Words In Your Face: A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years of the New York City was named a “Poetry Book of the Year” by The Washington Post.
Cristin’s eight collections of poetry span her entire writing life, beginning with Dear Future Boyfriend, published while she was still an undergrad at New York University; and Hot Teen Sl*t, her memoir-in-verse about her first job out of college: working as an editor for an “adult” website in the early days of the internet. Her next three collections –Working Class Represent; Oh, Terrible Youth; and Everything is Everything – cover her upbringing in Philadelphia as well as the 15 years she spent as a poet and organizer in New York City. The Year of No Mistakes, her memoir-in-verse about the break-up of a long term relationship, was named the Texas Poetry Book of the Year by the Writers League of Texas. Her next two collections, How to Love the Empty Air and Against Vanishing, completed her Texas triology.
Cristin graduated from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she studied screenwriting and playwriting. She ran the NYC-Urbana Poetry Slam – first out of CBGBs, and later out of the Bowery Poetry Club – while working as a permission’s assistant at the Artists Rights Society in Lower Manhattan. Her poetry and nonfiction work have appeared in Atlantic Monthly, [more], and other publications. Awards including a fellowships and residencies in association with the National Endowment for the Arts, the University of Pennsylvania, Hedgebrook, and the Amy Clampitt House, among others.
Cristin lives in her hometown of Philadelphia with her husband, the novelist Ernest Cline, and their family.
