Elina Katrin born to a Syrian father and a Russian mother in St. Petersburg, Russia, she is now bicoastal, residing in-between Southern California and Northern Virginia. A baking enthusiast, she holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Hollins University. Her writing received support from the Tin House Workshop, the Los Angeles Review of Books Publishing Workshop, and The Speakeasy Project. A semi-finalist for The Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, Elina's work was longlisted for Frontier Poetry's New Voices Contest and has appeared in Nimrod International Journal, bath magg, Hooligan Mag, The Fourth River, New World Writing Quarterly, and elsewhere. When not writing, she works with Mizna and can be spotted video chatting her dog back home.

Other poems on the web by Elina Katrin:
Two poems
"Spring Grace"
Two poems
"On the Other End of Translation"
"Portraits of America"
"Hip Replacement at Twenty-One"
"The Crossing of Our Accents"

Elina Katrin's Website.

Elina Katrin on Twitter.

About If My House Has A Voice:

"In her auspicious debut If My House Has a Voice, Elina Katrin probes the house of her own becoming, the meeting place of Syria (through her father) and Russia (through her mother)—trying to make a home in a third language (English) and country (America). With elegant, surprising enjambments, and pirouetting turns of phrase, her poems invite us into its confusing and beautiful rooms. A 'wannabe runaway,' she observes in 'Call This Anguish Home,' she finds that 'there is no route / I can take that won't lead me home.'"
—Candice Wuehle

"If My House Has A Voice is a passport of sorts; an invitation to traverse the neon fro-yo signs of L.A., the metro winds of St. Petersburg, the over abundance of Miami palms, and to see the moon rising over the mountains from the dance floor of a sticky Virginia bar. Elina Katrin acts as psychopomp between the deeply sensual world we know and another world slightly beyond description, knowing, or language. If My House Has A Voice yearns, 'Let there be a room to feel in a language/ without speaking it.' Katrin's collection elegantly, incandescently, creates this room, invites us in, and creates a space intimate enough for us to meet ourselves, wherever we may be."
—Philip Metres