Alicia Keys - Karma Busy Girl

She's writing travel reports every few weeks and has already filed three articles for the New York Daily News.

The five-time Grammy winner says she can see things through the average person's eyes: "I mean, I live a very normal life despite whatever anybody may believe. I'm a very low-key person."

Michelle Leifer, a Daily News travel editor, agrees: "She brings a good perspective. She's not jaded and is very youthful. She's seeing a lot of things for the first time."

This fall, Keys will release a book of poetry, and next year she will publish the non-musical Diary of Alicia Keys -- a collection of the singer's personal journal entries since she was 9.

"Very personal and very scary," Keys says of the diary.

Still, she finds strength in the writings of her youth: "To be able to read back on my thoughts reminds me of what I feel now, and who I want to be -- who I don't want to be."

Keys will also act in her first movie, a Halle Berry-produced biopic about Philippa Schuyler, a biracial woman who encountered racism as a classical pianist playing during the 1950s and '60s. Like Schuyler's, Keys' mother is white, and her father is black.

"I've always said I don't want to play a pianist, I don't want to play a singer. But I feel like this story is so powerful and perfect. It always happens like that," she says.page << 1 2 >>