Anne Poarch

Anne Poarch grew up the youngest of five in the sandhills of North Carolina. Her mother and sister taught her the fine art of making a home, the equal beauty in shelling fresh peas or folding a crisply laundered sheet, while her father and brothers taught her how to paint, fish, and garden…to be outside and ramble the woods. After graduating cum laude from Wake Forest University in 1991, Anne traveled to Paris, where she worked as an au pair for the Picasso family, and attended the University of Paris, Sorbonne. After her year-long sojourn abroad, she returned to live and work in Richmond, Virginia, where she lives today with her husband and two sons.

Anne worked for twenty-two years in the financial services industry as an institutional salesperson and financial advisor before leaving to start her own company and pursue her creative interests. As founder of Basket & Bike, a bicycle tour company offering bicycle excursions and rentals along the Virginia Capital Trail in Richmond and Williamsburg, she wants to empower people to connect with the land and their communities by promoting a leisurely bicycle lifestyle. Her company gives back a portion of every tour to a rotating conservation cause. Anne is a sustaining member of the Junior League of Richmond, Reveille United Methodist Church, the Woman’s Club, and the Tuckahoe Garden Club of Westhampton, a member club of the Garden Club of Virginia and the Garden Club of America.

To learn more about Anne, follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and visit her website.

Books

Flight: of butterflies and robins and other winged dreams

$23.95

A collection of forty-eight poems that chronicle a young woman’s self-discovery.

written by Anne Poarch

illustrated by Sander Gibson

Flight: of butterflies and robins and other winged dreams is a very personal collection of forty-eight poems. This thoughtful work chronicles the voice of a maturing young woman as she reawakens her heart and soul to the beauty of God’s natural world. She uncovers love, grief, self-awareness, and a happiness for which she is utterly unprepared. Bridging an out-of- doors childhood and the death of her father at age eleven, to a motherhood in which she longs to share all of nature with her young sons, the pages will surprise you and inspire you. To open these poems is to take a walk through the seasons, to pause and reflect on the intersection of the spiritual and physical, the love of parent and child. Placed mostly within the backdrop of Richmond, Virginia, words are arranged, not by academic instruction, but by feeling and emotion. Poems are shared with a voice of appreciation and awe, all the while wondering if the ephemeral dreams of love, joy, and beauty can be sustained. Or is that the lesson the young woman learns from her butterfly? As Anne Poarch expresses, none of us need try and hold beauty, because we all carry her in our hearts and souls.

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