Ada Jo Mann

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 38 years. The Peace Corps experience resulted in a career in international development, where she taught leadership development and trained more than 1000 NGOs and government workers. She was one of the early adapters of a positive approach to change, Appreciative inquiry. She has worked in more than 50 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 two collections of her poems “Words Create Worlds” and “High Hopes”. Her poems highlight family, nature, travel and politics. She enjoys experimenting with a variety of poetic forms and has written three crown sonnets.