Because she’s fascinated by true stories about people who face and overcome formidable challenges and whose voices have never been heard, Barbara Osteika feels compelled to create story forms that spotlight the accomplishments of remarkable unsung heroes. Her narrative nonfiction book, Southside Five, is just that. It describes five African-American Bureau of Prohibition Agents who went undercover and infiltrated the criminal underworld in the 1930s southside neighborhood of Chicago known as Bronzeville. They put their lives on the line for the same government that promoted Jim Crow laws legalizing racial segregation.

These agents helped the Bureau of Prohibition build a national operational undercover program where none previously existed, a program which today remains a critical tool to build complex cases within its legacy agency, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).  Their contributions to the development of the secret, deep, and long-term undercover program to combat organized crime during prohibition can still be seen in law enforcement operations today.

Ms. Osteika served 34 years in the federal government, first as a military intelligence analyst, then as a criminal investigator for ATF, and finally as ATF’s first historian. Her fiction and nonfiction works have appeared in publications in print and online including American Blue: Real Stories by Real Cops, Quality Women’s Fiction, and Penn-Union: A Journal of The Johns Hopkins University.

She currently lives with her husband/co-writer in Atlanta, Georgia.