Sofia M. Starnes
Poet and Editor
My Approach to Writing
My Approach to Editing
My Approach to Writing


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 and spiritual truth of the poem. In this sense, the poem renews itself in the course of each acquisition.