It is not hard to argue that every black performer in show business owes something to Bert Williams. Discovered in California in 1890 by a minstrel troupe manager, Williams swiftly became a regular player in the troupe. Traveling on from the rough-and-ready "medicine shows" that then dotted the West, he rose through the ranks of big-time vaudeville in New York City, and finally ascended to the previously all-white pinnacle of live-stage success: the fabled Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway. Inspite of his triumphs-he brought the first musical with an all-black cast to Broadway in 1903-he was often viewed by the black community with more critical suspicion than admiration because of his controversial decision to perform in blackface. Modest, private, and conservative in his personal life, Williams left political activism and soapbox thumping to others. More than the simple narration of a remarkable life, Introducing Bert Williams offers a fascinating window into the fraught issues surrounding race and artistic expression in American culture. The story of Williams's long and varied career is a whirlwind of inner turmoil, racial tension, glamour, and striving-nothing less than the birth of American show business.

1945 Chicago. Anything can happen, and for Richard Marchetti, it usually does. Marie Marchetti, however, doesn't know that about her husband. To her, they have the perfect life. Until little things start to pop up that put her on alert: late night phone calls, cryptic receipts hidden in the basement, and a gun in his desk drawer. When she learns he secretly attends a mobster's funeral, her feelings are confirmed. And when she inadvertently interrupts a meeting between Richard and his so-called business associates, he causes her to fall down the basement steps, compelling Marie to run for her life. Ending up in Atchison, Kansas, Marie quickly sets up a new life for herself. She meets Karen Franklin, a woman who will become her lifelong best friend, and rents a coach house apartment behind a three-story Victorian home. But her attempts at a new life are fraught with the fear that Richard will show up at any time -- and who knows what he or his associates will do then? Ironically, it is the discovery of the identity of her real father and his ethnicity that unexpectedly changes her life forever. Deftly portraying a life in a terrifying transition, Osmund tears open layers of confusion, anger, fear, and shame that are universal to the human experience of catharsis and growth. With extraordinary insight into our most basic need for trust and connection, The Coach House expertly builds tension as it brings into the open our primal instincts for survival and community.

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I wrote this collection of poems because I have read extensively and the more I read the more fascinated I became with the relationships of animals and people with one another. I believed, at the time, there would be little need for another book of poetry but while analyzing my own observances and beliefs, the genuine need for more lines that rhymed with a cadence of life took me over. I wanted to make the facts as much as can possibly flow evenly with true feelings about my life and others who have surely experienced a deep down desire to put pen to paper. I caught myself daydreaming about someday seeing the name Penny Aiken on the front cover of some kind of book. Writing in first person lets me live mentally the actions that are being relayed in the poems. Naming my book A Penny for Your Thoughts just seemed to fit the mold. It sounded right to everyone I mentioned it to so I finally sold myself on using it. I have tried to write such a book.