Anna Mae, originally from Hertfordshire, now resides on the Essex Coast. She is active in her community, attending writing and poetry groups and is passionate about self-empowerment. Previously she’d worked for Women’s Aid, facilitated creative writing workshops in a prison, a mental health unit, secondary schools and bereavement groups. At the age of 63, some eight years after writing the original manuscript for this book, she obtained a BA Honours Degree in Creative Writing.

Anna explains: “This all began about seventeen years ago. Years before I tragically lost my baby to cot death and as his 30th birthday approached, I wanted to mark the occasion, as I would have done had he lived. I’d never written poetry before but the rhymes just came as if something had been unbottled, and when I performed them for others they seemed to get as much out of the poems as I did. Everybody feels and bears their grief differently and if I can help even one person feel they’ve been seen and that there is a path through the thorns, that means everything.

I wanted to pursue writing so in the year I turned 60, I went back to university to get a BA Hons in Creative Writing. It was there I discovered that I was dyslexic and not any of the lesser, more horrible labels that had been applied to me in my childhood and beyond. I am extremely passionate about helping others, especially kids, get into writing and reaffirm that there is nothing wrong with them - they just learn differently. Writing has definitely helped me see my worth and that is what I want to give to them. Being dyslexic is actually a great leveller when I’m teaching - if I can do it, so can they. 

I want to champion everyone who has ever been knocked down (be it through having a learning difficulty, being in an abusive relationship as I was, or struggling with bereavement). The poems in this book are not all bereavement ones but the stories that lead up to each poem explains the context and I hope make for more of an experience that will help in some small way anyone who reads it.” , in 2005. We pride ourselves on providing outstanding customer service to order to guarantee that all of our clients are 100% satisfied.