About the Book

A life’s journey told through poems of memory, nature, love, and the resilience of the human spirit…

In High Hopes, Ada Jo Mann traces the arc of a long, love filled life with a poet’s eye and a storyteller’s grace.

From Detroit childhood memories and the exhilaration of summer camp in Maine to the sweetness of motherhood, aging, and quiet evenings on the porch, these poems illuminate the extraordinary beauty within ordinary days.

With humor, tenderness, and unflinching honesty, Mann explores the complexities of family, friendship, loss, political unease, and the natural world’s steadying presence.

Her poems invite us to slow down, listen closely, and rediscover the small miracles that carry us through fear, change, and time.

High Hopes is a celebration of endurance, gratitude, and the lifelong search for meaning in the world around us—and within ourselves.

About the Author

Ada Jo Mann lives in Silver Spring, Maryland. She grew up in Detroit and went to Cranbrook Kingswood for high school and the University of Michigan for college. After that she joined the Peace Corps and spent two years in Chad as a health volunteer. After the Peace Corps she moved to Washington, DC and started a family.

She returned to the Peace Corps as staff and is known for having started a small-grants program funded by USAID for volunteers and their counterparts which continued for thirty-eight years. The Peace Corps experience resulted in a career in international development, where she taught leadership development and trained more than one thousand NGOs and government workers. She was one of the early adapters of a positive approach to change, called Appreciative Inquiry.

She has worked in more than fifty countries, mostly in Africa and Asia, and lived for two years in Ethiopia. When she retired, she discovered her poetic voice through courses she took at the independent bookstore Politics and Prose. As a result, she published a collection of her poems called Words Create World. Her poems highlight family, nature, travel, and politics. She enjoys experimenting with a variety of poetic forms and has written three crown sonnets.