An Evening of Poetry with Wesley Houp and Katerina Stoykova

About the Books:

Strung Out Along the Endless Branch by Wesley Houp was selected by Greg Pape as the winner of the inaugural James Baker Hall Book Award. Accents Publishing is proud to present this debut collection by a brilliant poet, philosopher and observer of both human nature and the natural world.

In Between a Bird Cage and a Bird House, author Katerina Stoykova follows that which "calls / the roaming mind / looking for land" with the shell of her homeland at her back. Through themes of domestic abuse, the death of a parent, the loss of a friend, and the search for cultural identity, the poems in this collection transcend the borders of language and nation-states. As a Bulgarian immigrant, Stoykova weighs the differences between safety and captivity, exploring how one can feel sheltered yet still not feel at home.

About the Authors:

Wesley Houp was born and raised in High Bridge and Wilmore, Kentucky. He received a PhD in Composition and Rhetoric from Indiana University of Pennsylvania and taught undergraduate and graduate English courses for over 20 years in Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Tennessee in addition to serving as Writing Center Director at several universities. For the better part of the last decade, he has worked for Tennessee State Parks. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Black Warrior Review, Chattahoochee Review, Kentucky Poetry Review, and Good River Review. His scholarly work in literacy education and pedagogy has appeared in Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy and Teaching English in the Two-Year College, among others. This volume, his first, won the inaugural James Baker Hall Book Award for Poetry in 2024. He currently lives in Murfreesboro, Tennessee with his wife, Laura and their daughter and son, Chloe and Henry. 

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

About the the James Baker Hall Foundation:

The mission of the James Baker Hall Foundation is to celebrate the legacy of our great artistic heritage by providing direct support to Kentucky’s literary and visual creatives. We believe creating art is a sacred gesture that gives testimony to the very fabric of life. Art is the record of our existence. We believe creating art is a vehicle to change individual lives and build communities. We conduct all our work through this lens. These values are the pillars of the James Baker Hall Foundation. For more information, visit jamesbakerhallfoundation.org

Host or Publisher Susan Norton