A. Molotkov and Your Life as It Is

Tell us the story of your Accents Publishing book, Your Life as It Is.

This long poem was written in 2011, during what was perhaps my last visit to my country of birth, Russia, which I hate with all my heart. I experienced a swirl of thoughts and emotions connected to the changes in my life stemming from emigration. This affected the poem, which can be seen as a set of building blocks for a life. Repeated and altered, they befall the second-person protagonist in unexpected and unpredictable order. In the end, Accents Publishing graciously accepted the piece and brought it out in 2014.

What do you like most about it?

It feels awkward to compliment my own work, but my goal was to allow the text to open itself to any reader, providing many common “life points” of reference. In particular, the text is intended to be gender-neutral, with the alternating use of gender pronouns.

What did you have to overcome in order to finish and publish a book?

The pressures of a full-time job and the challenges of the business-driven model of the U.S. publishing world, which often marginalizes unique and demanding texts.

What do you hope people learn/receive/experience from reading your book?

I hope they might think about their own life and are moved to approach some challenges differently, or to treat others with more care.

What was your favorite interaction with a reader and/or a fan?

A message or a letter from someone I have not met physically, sharing that my work has helped or inspired them. This has happened only several times in my life, each such encounter a powerful endorsement of my choice to become a writer.


What are you working on now? Catch us up one significant event in your life since the publication of Your Life as It Is.

A few events rather than one. I published four poetry collections since 2014, but as always, most of my time is spent on prose. I’m writing my next novel, The Melting Frame, and my earlier novels, A Bag Full of Stones and A Slight Curve, came out in 2025. My memoir, A Broken Russia Inside Me, won a small press contest and will be out in 2026. It briefly mentions my work on “Your Life as It Is.”

Optional bonus question: Is there anything you want to get off your chest about writing or publishing? 

It’s a pursuit that makes sense only over the span of a life (as it is). Most practitioners receive no guarantees early on, if ever. The writer must manifest not only the text, but its future.

BIRDS OF THUNDER by Jessica D Thompson

Accents Publishing is proud to present BIRDS OF THUNDER by Jessica D Thompson, a collection of poems about survival, transformation, and the hard-won freedom of becoming fully oneself. Moving through girlhood and womanhood, violence and grief, love and loss, Thompson turns again and again to the natural world—birds, rivers, trees, light—as a source of wisdom, refuge, and renewal. Fierce yet tender, Birds of Thunder is ultimately a book about finding one’s voice and discovering, after all that has been endured, the courage to rise.

Women populate the pages of Jessica D. Thompson’s Birds of Thunder—hurt women, lost women, brave women, and one woman, the poet herself, with the strength and compassion to hold them all, along with frost flowers, sycamores, a kettle of vultures, and “ghost horses with red manes.” Birds of Thunder picks you up by the scruff of the neck and will not let go.
— Pauletta Hansel, Cincinnati Poet Laureate emerita; author of Understory: A Women’s History of Appalachia

Jessica D. Thompson’s Birds of Thunder emerges from the shadows of domestic violence into the sanctuary of a woman discovering her agency. “Summon the crown fashioned from clover,” urges the speaker on this lyrical journey of insight, rendered with tenderness and precision. This poet conjures both the darkness of human nature, “… that which stirs beneath / the blunt blade of a shovel,” and the spirit of resilience, “… her heart ablaze, her laughter a bonfire.” Thompson is a poet of witness, one who sees transcendence in soaring vultures, carnival glass, prayer wheels, and a woman’s strength. Like the night heron, “we dive into the sea-tangled wrack weed, / searching for something lost.” With this poet as a guide, we willingly search.
— Ellen Austin-Li, author of Incidental Pollen, runner-up to Madville Publishing’s Arthur Smith Poetry Prize

The poems in Birds of Thunder paint the ancient danger of being a girl and a woman, and the recipient of men’s desires and angers. They paint loss and grief, recalibrating and starting over. They paint love. Full of intricate images and specificity, the poems connect us to the intersection where human, natural, and divine influence each other, and where time seems a closed book with the past, present, and future all singing at the same time.
— Melissa Jørgenrud Helton, author of A Middle-Aged Woman Rages

A sample poem and ordering information are at this link.

“I’m Not From Around Here”

Accents Publishing’s founder and senior editor was interviewed by David Miller for Eastern Standard’s series “I’m Not From Around Here.” Give it a listen if you are curious and you have 13 free minutes.


https://esweku.org/track/5029014/october-15-2026_david-miller-katerina-stoykova

Manny Grimaldi Reads Orfeito

Orfeito is a sweeping bilingual poetry collection inspired by the enduring Orpheus tradition—from classical mythology to its Black Atlantic reinterpretations. Through interconnected poems, Ricardo Nazario y Colón follows a Puerto Rican boy whose journey carries him from the island to New York and beyond, where family history, migration, Afro-Caribbean spirituality, first love, grief, memory, and cultural inheritance converge into an intimate coming-of-age epic. Moving effortlessly between English and Spanish, the collection is rich with music, myth, and spellbinding storytelling, revealing how identity is not inherited whole but forged across borders, languages, and generations.

Elizabeth Marro interviews Andrew Merton about his new Accents Publishing book

“In one way or another I have been an entertainer for most of my life. In college I played bass guitar in a rock band; then, for 43 years as a teacher of writing in a college classroom, I knew that entertainment was part of the deal. Much of my writing, including this book, was meant to be entertaining. This does not mean that readers need to share all my views to enjoy the book.

It deals with a lot of serious stuff. But most of the stories are spiced with humor. My voice is edgy, often self-deprecating, often (I hope) funny. If Kurt Vonnegut and Nora Ephron had had a son, I like to think he would have written the way I do.”

Elizabeth Marro interviews Andrew Merton about his new Accents Publishing book, Gloria Steinem Blurbed Me And Other Miracles: An Autobiography in Prose and Poetry

https://elizabethmarro.substack.com/p/write-what-you-know-or-write-what