Elina Petrova, a poet from Ukraine, began learning English in her mid-thirties. Among other themes, Desert Candles (2019) and her first collection of English-language poetry, Aching Miracle (2015), chronicle Elina’s journey toward a new culture. Though not educated in literature and the language arts in Ukraine — she obtained advanced degrees in heating engineering and worked in engineering management — Elina developed a fondness for creative writing and wrote her Russian-language poetry in her hometown of Donetsk. There she published her first book of poems and received the First Prize of International Poetry Fest, “Text” (Ukraine, 1998).
After she immigrated to the United States in 2007, Elina dedicated several years to home studies of her new language and working at her new profession as a legal assistant. Soon she started writing her first English-language poems that gradually began attracting attention.
Elina’s poems have been published in the Notre Dame Review, Texas Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Southwestern American Literature, Porter House Review, Pedestal Magazine, California Quarterly, FreeFall (Canada), Ocotillo Review, Poetry of the American Southwest series, Melancholy Hyperbole, The Ekphrastic Review. Her poems appeared in anthologies by presses of Sul Ross State University, Lamar University and elsewhere.
A film presenting her poem, “Hidden Life,” placed first at the 2023 Miami Chroma Film Festival in the category Best Cinematic Poetry. A frequent Pushcart Prize nominee and a finalist for the post of Houston Poet Laureate in 2015, Elina contributed to several public libraries’ events, where she won top honors in the 2018 and 2019 Ekphrastic Poetry Contests and received a runner-up award in the 2020 national contest of Public Poetry, “Wicked Wit.” She was appointed Austin International Poetry Fest's Featured Poet in 2019 and has been featured in the Huffington Post’s “Five Poets You Need to Know About” as one of Houston's important emerging poets.
Elina now works in a Houston law firm. She became an American citizen in 2014, but remains a citizen of the world.
