About The Author
About The Author
The Artist Behind the Books - Anneke Letitia
Anneke Letitia arrived in America as a young Dutch immigrant, her small hand held tightly by her sister as they walked along a canal in Friesland. She carried little more than hope and an already watchful eye. That eye, trained by years of observing a new world and a new language, would one day become her greatest artistic instrument.
Music gave her first voice. A shy child in a strange land, she discovered the flute and found she could speak through it. She practiced relentlessly, eventually performing as principal flutist with the Grand Rapids Symphony and teaching generations of students as a university professor. But a terrible car accident at nineteen, leaving her in a coma for seven weeks, taught her that life moves in fragile rhythms. Recovery took over a year. It also taught her patience, the kind required to notice what others overlook.
She married John, a teacher, and together they adopted three children from Korea. Her youngest arrived with special needs, requiring advocacy and care that would shape her understanding of vulnerability. In the midst of this full life, she picked up a camera. She began walking the five acres around their small farm, documenting the bumblebees on the thimbleberry flowers, the monarchs on the milkweed, the birds returning each spring.
What emerged was not casual photography. It was a disciplined practice, an eight-year longitudinal study of a world in quiet crisis. Her first book, Pictured Life, honors the immigrant families who built Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Her second, Birds Bugs Butterflies, documents the fragile creatures inhabiting that same landscape today. Together, they form a complete vision, one born of a life spent learning to see.
She still performs with local ensembles. She still walks her land, camera in hand. And she still approaches each tiny creature, each weathered barn, each human story with the same reverence: as something precious, fleeting, and worth preserving.