Sofia M. Starnes is a writer of Philippine-Spanish heritage and an American citizen since 1989. She was born in Manila, was educated in the Institución Teresiana (Saint Pedro Poveda College), and subsequently moved to Spain, where she received an advanced degree in English Philology from the University of Madrid. She holds a degree in English Pedagogy from the Instituto de Idiomas in Madrid as well.

Sofia is the author of five poetry collections, listed below. (For availability and purchase information, please visit the "Books & Reviews" page of this site.)
 
Her chapbook, The Soul's Landscape (January 2002), was selected by then U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins as one of two co-winners of the 2001 Aldrich Poetry Prize.
 
Her first full-length poetry book, A Commerce of Moments, won the Editor's Prize in the 2001 Transcontinental Poetry Award competition (Pavement Saw Press, August 2003) and was subsequently named Honor Book in the 2004 Virginia Literary Awards Competition.

In 2008, her collection, Corpus Homini: A Poem for Single Flesh, was awarded the Whitebird Poetry Series Prize and published, as a limited-edition, signed and numbered chapbook, by Wings Press.

Her fourth collection, Fully Into Ashes, a full-length book, also was published by Wings Press in April 2011.

Most recently, Franciscan University Press issued her fifth collection: Love and the Afterlife, a limited-edition, signed and numbered, chapbook, as part of the university's poetry series.

Sofia has won several awards for her poetry. She is the recipient of a Poetry Fellowship from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, the 1997 Rainer Maria Rilke Poetry Prize, Editor's Prize in the 2002 Marlboro Prize in Poetry competition, the 2004 Conference on Christianity and Literature Poetry Prize, the 2005 Superior Achievement Award in Poetry (Virginia Writer's Club), two Pushcart Prize nominations, and designation as a Distinguished Scholar by Union College (Barbourville, Kentucky, 2009).

Sofia's work has appeared in numerous journals, among them The Southern Poetry Review, The Notre Dame Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, The Laurel Review, Hubbub, Pleiades, Gulf Coast, The Madison Review, Hotel Amerika, The Hawaii Pacific Review (Best of the Decade Issue, 2007), The Marlboro Review, and War, Literature, and the Arts. Her literary reviews have been featured in Christianity and the Arts, ImageUpdate, and Christianity and Literature, and she is listed in Who's Who in the World, Who's Who in America, and Who's Who of American Women. Since 2008, she has served as the Poetry Editor of The Anglican Theological Review, an international scholarly journal of theological reflection, out of the Chicago area, which publishes essays, book reviews, and poetry by writers of various Christian traditions (www.anglicantheologicalreview.org). 

Sofia Starnes lives in Williamsburg, Virginia, with her husband Bill. She offers writing tutorials and comprehensive editing services to writers of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry, through Creative Writing Critiques. (For more on Creative Writing Critiques, please see Editing page.)