Stella Pope Duarte began her literary career in 1995 after she had a dream in which her deceased father related to her that her destiny was to become a writer. Her first collection of short stories, Fragile Night, (Bilingual Review Press, 1997) won a creative writing fellowship from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, and was named a candidate for the prestigious, Pen West Fiction Award. In 2001 Ms. Duarte was awarded a second creative writing fellowship for her current novel, Let Their Spirits Dance. (HarperCollins, 2002). HarperCollins has described Duarte as a "major, new literary voice in