Ann Burke

Ann Burke has a B.A. in English from what is now Southern Adventist University near Chattanooga, Tennessee. But her interest in authors, words, and linking words together began long before, when she was nine.

It was a West Virginia springtime that did it--three lilac bushes in the yard of a white rental, early flowers popping up between the house and the road, and behind the house, an old apple orchard that still turned to glory in the spring. "Will There Be Springtime in Heaven?" was her first foray into creating with words.

Ann Burke's verse, stories, and articles have appeared in a number of periodicals through the years. These included "Insight," a magazine for young readers, and "Adventist Review," a periodical for adult Christians. In 1982 she received a diploma from The Institute of Children's Literature and subsequently published her first book, "Light the Lantern, Daughter," a story of her mother's girlhood in the Deep South.

More recently, following a trip to the high Piedmont of northern Italy, she has written "To the Last Drop of Our Blood: A Story of Government and Religion." This book, by its very nature requiring extensive documentation, is different from anything else she has written. She sweetened the task by the use of imagination and description of sights she enjoyed in the lap of the Italian Alps.

Ann Burke lives with her husband in the foothills of the San Bernardino Mountains in southern California, where she enjoys the yearly emergence of California poppies in her front yard.