Sometimes one lifetime isn’t enough to hold all the versions of who we become—especially for writers, or anyone who’s ever started over.
I’ve been thinking about what happens when you cross an invisible border—geography, language, career—and suddenly the words you’ve always trusted go quiet. Our guest today knows that silence intimately. She grew up in communist Bulgaria, moved to Kentucky, stopped writing for eleven years…and then, driving to work one morning, a poem jolted through her like electricity. That current carried her back to herself.
Today I’m talking with poet, publisher, and community builder Katerina Stoykova about identity, reinvention, and the long road back to the page. We get into losing—and re-finding— your voice in a new language, why throwing away a year of work can be an act of devotion, what it takes to shape a pile of poems into a book, and how small daily goals add up to a creative life.
We also dig into her press, Accents Publishing, her craft book The Poet’s Guide to Publishing, and the metaphor at the heart of her latest poetry collection, Between a Birdcage and a Birdhouse—that liminal space between nesting and flight. If you’ve ever felt “in between,” this one’s going to land.
In this episode:
- Growing up in communist Bulgaria, immigrating to the U.S., and holding two identities at once
- The 11-year silence—and the poem that arrived like a jolt in a Kroger parking lot
- Writing in a second language and giving yourself permission to “waste” pages
- The craft and logistics of poetry books: conceiving, arranging, editing, publishing, marketing
- Founding Accents Publishing (from hand-bound chapbooks in the dining room to global distribution)
- Community as a lifeline: Kentucky Book Festival and the Kentucky State Poetry Society
- Journaling → harvesting → (yes) burning: a ritual for clarity and privacy
- The birdcage/birdhouse metaphor for the immigrant experience—home as a moving target
- Monthly creative goals, tiny daily commitments, and tricking your brain past resistance
- Why not being yourself is the costliest path of all
About Katerina
A Bulgarian by birth, Katerina Stoykova is a bilingual poet living in Kentucky and is the author of Between a Bird Cage and a Bird House (University Press of Kentucky, 2024) and The Poet’s Guide to Publishing: How to Conceive, Arrange, Edit, Publish and Market a Book of Poetry (McFarland, 2024). Katerina is the founder and senior editor of Accents Publishing, as well as the creator of the Accents podcast on WUKY. Katerina served as the 2023-2024 Director of the Kentucky Book Festival, as well as the Director for the Center for the Book in Kentucky and is the 2025-2026 President of the Kentucky State Poetry Society.
Connect
The Poet’s Guide to Publishing (McFarland, 2024)
Between a Bird Cage and a Bird House (Poetry)
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