Sofia M. Starnes
Sofia M. Starnes was born in Manila and educated in Madrid. She arrived in the United States in 1986 and became a U.S. citizen in 1989. Her publications include The Soul’s Landscape (Aldrich, 2002), co-winner of the Aldrich Chapbook Poetry Award, judged by Billy Collins, and A Commerce of Moments (Pavement Saw Press, 2003), Editor’s Choice in the Transcontinental Poetry Book Prize and a Poetry Honor Book in the Library of Virginia Literary Awards Competition. Her poems and essays have also appeared in numerous literary journals, including Hayden’s Ferry, Laurel Review, Notre Dame Review, Gulf Coast, Southern Poetry Review, Marlboro Review, and Pleiades.
Starnes’s poetry has been recognized in a variety of ways. She is the recipient of a poetry fellowship from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, the Rainer Maria Rilke Poetry Award, the Marlboro Poetry Award (Editor’s Choice), the Christianity and Literature Poetry Prize, and a Pushcart Prize nomination, among other citations.
Artist’s Statement
I write according to this dictum: “We write for ourselves and for a stranger.” That stranger – the sought-after reader – would be someone for whom the poet’s specific experience, the kernel of the poem, is far less important than the reader’s own experience, awakened through a connection with the emotional truth of each poem. In this sense, the poem renews itself in the course of each acquisition.
Contact Sofia M. Starnes
Website: http://www.authorsite.com