SOFIA M. STARNES, a writer of Philippine-Spanish heritage, was born in Manila and received an advanced degree in English Philology from the University of Madrid. In 1986, after her marriage to William H. Starnes, Jr., she moved to the United States. She became an American citizen in 1989. Her full-length poetry book A Commerce of Moments won Editor's Prize in the 2001 Transcontinental Poetry Award competition (Pavement Saw Press, August 2003). Her chapbook The Soul's Landscape was selected by Billy Collins as one of two co-winners in the 2001 Aldrich Poetry competition and was published in January 2002. Other awards include the 2001 Editor's Prize in the Marlboro Review Prize in Poetry competition, the 1997 Rainer Maria Rilke Poetry Prize, a Poetry Fellowship of the Virginia Commission for the Arts, and a Pushcart Prize nomination. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Laurel Review, Southern Poetry Review, Hotel Amerika, The Madison Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, American Literary Review, Gulf Coast, Hubbub, The Hawaii Pacific Review, and Pavement Saw Magazine. The poems published in this issue of the Notre Dame Review belong to her book-length manuscript The Rood of Jesse, a finalist in the Poets Out Loud Poetry competition (Fordham University Press) and currently in search of a publisher. Sofia and her husband live in Williamsburg, Virginia, where she is at work on a new poetry collection to be titled The Pindrop Sonnets.