When Katerina Stoykova moved to the United States from her native Bulgaria in the 1990s, she experienced something she’d never experienced before: For the first time in her life, she stopped writing. A new country, new language, new marriage, new job (engineering at Lexmark) and life as a new mother were a few of the things absorbing the time and attention that Stoykova, who started writing poetry at 8 years old, had devoted to her beloved craft for her entire life. For just over a decade, she didn’t write at all.
This month marks a decidedly different decade-long milestone for Stoykova. On Feb. 4, Accents Publishing, the small independent press that she started in 2010, will celebrate its 10th anniversary. (Click here for more details on the event!) Stoykova founded the press soon after reintroducing poetry into her life, after quitting her job at Lexmark to pursue an MFA in creative writing at Spalding University.
“When I was quitting my Lexmark job, people were saying ‘what are you going to do?’” Stoykova recalls. “I said, ‘In two years, when I graduate, I’ll know.’”
Katerina Stoykova displays a copy of Second Skin. a collection of poetry centered around growing up in domestic violence. Told from the perspective of a child, the works focus on some of the long-term effects of such upbringings. Second Skin received wide acclaim and attention, including a 2018 Creative Europe grant by the European Commission for the book to be translated and published in English. Photo by Bradley Quinn
In line with that prediction, by the time she graduated, Stoykova had announced the release of the first two Accents Publishing books: poetry collections by Jude Lally and Jim Lally, a nephew and uncle. The release party for those two books took place in February 2010, to an impressive, standing-room only crowd at Common Grounds Coffee Shop. The event was so well-attended, guests could barely walk through the coffee shop, she recalled.
“It was a very big celebration – we sold out of all our books,” Stoykova said. “It was a very successful beginning.”
That response – and the enthusiasm that followed – helped affirm what Stoykova saw as a need for the press among the local literary community. Accents has since published more than 60 poetry books, a mix of curated anthologies and works or collections from single authors, with a large focus on local and regional authors. While the press has historically published mostly poetry, it has extended branches into other writing forms. The press recently hosted a competition for novellas (fictional prose that usually falls between the lengths of a short story and a novel) and will soon publish a series of those from a handful of authors. Stoykova said she has enjoyed reading the entries, which have come from around the country. She said it’s a process she prefers to go into blindly, without knowing anything about the submitting writers.
“I’m reading them without knowing who’s been published in The New Yorker, who has three Ph.D.s,” she said. “That’s the good thing about being an independent press: I publish what I like.”
Accents Publishing went on temporary hiatus in 2016, when Stoykova moved back to Bulgaria for a short time following a divorce. (She and her former husband, Dan Klemer, with whom she started Accents Publishing, still have an amicable relationship and continue to own and collaborate on the business together.) During her time in Bulgaria, she published a collection of her own poems called “Second Skin,” which focused on the horrors of growing up in a home marred by domestic violence. Initially published in Bulgarian by ICU Publishing, the book received wide acclaim and attention in her native country, where she said domestic violence is rampant but not something that is openly discussed or widely portrayed.
“In a country where every fourth woman has been subject of domestic violence, nobody talks about it, nobody writes about it,” she said. The book – which she believes to be the first book about domestic language published in that country – ended up being widely covered by the Bulgarian media, and Stoykova received a 2018 grant by the European Commission for the book to be translated and published in English ( Accents published it in 2019).
Accents Publishing, LLC, launched in 2010 by Stoykova-Klemer, strives to promote brilliant voices in an affordable publication format, and to foster an exchange of literature among different world cultures and languages. Photo by Bradley Quinn
Stoykova said that the process of “publishing, translating and recovering from” that book, and the unexpected attention it brought her, took her three years, and when she returned to Lexington, she was excited to return her attention to the work of publishing other writers w
hom she reveres. She views publishing poetry, the act of connecting authors and readers, as a service and an honor – seeing poetry as “the emotional barometer of our times.
“The world needs poetry,” she said. “It encourages abstract thought, and abstract thought helps you see the bigger picture…Poetry takes the emotional pulse of the world we live in.”
Accents Publishing will celebrate its 10-year anniversary with an event on Feb. 4 at the University of Kentucky Art Museum, featuring readings from 13 authors who have been published by Accents (each will read one poem). The event will also kick off a new monthly reading series for local and regional authors hosted by Accents.
“It feels like there’s a need for a [new] monthly literary series – I think that people miss the Holler Poet Series,” Stoykova said, referencing the long-running literary series hosted by local writer Eric Sutherland, which held its final installment in 2016. (Accents recently published a collection by Sutherland, and he will be among the readers at its 10-year anniversary event.)
Accents has provided an invaluable service not only to the local writers and readers it serves but to Stoykova as well.
“It’s been one of the biggest gifts of my life,” she said. “I have learned from every one of the books, from every one of the writers. I feel immensely richer after all these books and meeting all these people.
“I think every job is enriching in some way,” she added. “This one has given me so much.”
More information, including access to purchase the books published by Accents Publishing, can be found at www.accents-publishing.com. Stoykova also hosts a weekly radio show, Accents Radio Hour, where she conducts interviews with writers and other artists about their creative process. The show airs on WRFL (88.1 FM or online at wrfl.fm) on Tuesdays from 3-4 p.m. Accents Publishing will soon be posting an opening for new interns – email accents.publising@gmail.com for more information.