Overwintered, Elina Katrin‘s debut poetry collection, explores the body as a site of memory, displacement, illness, and renewal. Moving between Syria, Russia, and the United States, Katrin traces the complicated experience of inhabiting the immigrant body, the female body, and the ailing body while searching for connection and belonging. Through recurring images of flowers, dreams, and changing seasons, the collection considers what we inherit, what we carry alone, and what it means to emerge from winter transformed.
Overwintered will be published on February 1, 2027, by Trio House Press and is available for preorder now.
Elina Katrin is a poet and writer whose work explores migration, memory, womanhood, and the body. Her debut poetry collection, Overwintered, is forthcoming from Trio House Press.
Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of Overwintered, designed by Coral Sue and featuring Lovis Corinth’s Women with Lilies in a Green House, along with a Q&A with Katrin about its creation.
While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?
I had some recurring images, refrains that come up in my work that I thought would make compelling elements of the cover, but I didn’t have a singular holistic idea in mind. Overwintered has been six years in the making, and while I was treating this project as a collection even when I only had a handful of poems written, I didn’t start intentionally thinking about the cover until I signed my contract with Trio House Press. Call it being superstitious or realistic—I didn’t want to get too carried away with dreaming up an ideal cover before I found the right home for my debut book. I also know that having a hyper-specific vision from the get-go could sometimes cause more harm than good for the project, so I only began the brainstorming process when Overwintered had a publication date, and I had the cover questionnaire in front of me.
Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your publishing team?
One of the fields in the cover questionnaire asked me to compile cover designs I like to get a sense of my aesthetic. Thanks to this exercise, I spent many hours gathering the books I loved (Saba Keramati’s Self-Mythology, Sarah Ghazal Ali’s Theophanies, Emily Skaja’s Brute—just to name a few) and thinking critically about why I gravitate toward certain covers as a reader and a poet. Equally if not more important, though, this exercise combined with other questions about the energy and feeling of Overwintered made me realize that just because I love some covers as a reader, their style might not be the right fit for my book.
With this as our grounding point, Trio House Press sent the filled-out questionnaire to the cover designer assigned to my book, Coral Sue. I look back at the first round of covers my team sent me as the beginning of a choose your own adventure story—three options, three various paths Overwintered could set off on. First, a vibrant collage. Sharp and eye-catching but ultimately too loud for this book. Second, a draft with three central figures, which I appreciated in its evocation of community but worried would be misleading for a collection with one main speaker. Third, an illustration that brought the container of my work to the foreground—the body. At the core of Overwintered is the speaker’s relationship to the bodies she inhabits: the immigrant body shaped by conflict and displacement; the female body molded by cultural and political expectations; and the ailing body formed by medical interventions. I chose the third path for the book, and we dived deeper.
The publishing team, Coral, and I worked together to ensure that while the female body is the primary point of focus, the cover also featured other elements. I was particularly interested in florals, since snowdrops and lilies of the valley appear throughout Overwintered as recurring imagery. For inspiration, I shared references to specific artworks, ranging from the Art Nouveau abundance of Alphonse Mucha and the saturated hues of Maxfield Parrish to the more reserved and understated lines of a contemporary Russian painter, Andrey Averyanov. The second draft of the cover Coral designed got much closer to that aesthetic, beautiful in its composition of the central figure framed with an organic border of lily stems. Seeing that version helped me internalize for what felt like the first time: we were working on the cover for my debut. Oh, was I giddy.
And though we were on the right track, we still needed to get on the same page about the colors, fonts, and background details. The cover at the time was very green, lush and vibrant, and I wanted to work with muted pastel tones, more evocative of late winter and early spring. The most challenging part of the process was balancing out the textures of the cover and finding cohesion between the highly intricate painting elements of the central figure and clean graphic design details. Eventually, my publisher recommended we take a step back and look through artwork archives to see if anything jumped out as a good fit for Overwintered.
That’s when we came across Lovis Corinth’s “Women with Lilies in a Green House,” and everything clicked. This impressionist painting offered the unity we were seeking, miraculously blending all the elements we wanted to prioritize in the previous cover drafts. When Coral added the necessary typography, I was struck. That’s it, I thought. That’s my book. Finally, with a physical body of its own.
Looking back, I see how necessary and special the pivot to using Corinth’s artwork was for the process. The final cover puts the speaker of my poems, who often reaches across time and distance in search of connection and belonging, in conversation with yet another artist. The artist who skillfully captured the strength and vulnerability of womanhood, whose work can now live on and touch even more people as the cover of Overwintered.
What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?
After seeing the final cover, I took a breath. Any artist or creative knows that when you’re working on a project for a long time, it’s easy to get lost in the process. There’s always another goal to work toward, another item to cross off the to-do list. My immigrant mind that’s used to the never-ending paperwork and bureaucratic hoops is programmed to immediately move on to the next thing, so I had to intentionally practice mindfulness and bring my focus to the present moment. My book had a cover. I experienced a deep sense of gratitude for everyone who helped my work reach this milestone: my publisher, designer, friends who’ve supported me every step of the way. Rooted in community, I felt thankful, excited, and ready.
How does the cover work to convey what the book is all about?
The cover of the book grounds the reader, expanding the title. To overwinter means to pass the winter season and emerge renewed. Enveloped by flowers, the woman in the artwork surrenders to spring, the central season of the collection and an extended metaphor that symbolizes change, possibility, and the larger motif of return: to our homelands, our people, our true selves.
I love how the woman in the painting is almost an extension of the floral landscape, not unlike the speaker of Overwintered, who is constantly in conversation with the world around her. Be it the chocolate-covered figs at Trader Joe’s that evoke a memory of her cousins in Syria, or the Santa Monica beach where she seeks kinship with Marina Tsvetaeva, the twentieth-century Russian poet. With its natural light and loose brushwork, the cover further unifies focal lilies with the dense green flower stems and the blur of the woman’s figure, allowing all the elements to work in tandem to create an intimate, introspective scene. This synergetic composition embodies the essence of the book. Whether it’s the sequence of “Figment” poems that draws on dreams and myth as portals into memory and imagination, or narrative poems that try to balance what we collectively inherit with what we carry alone—the book holds contradictions in one breath and finds empowerment within the duality.
The cover offers form to the speaker’s pursuit of hope amid fracture and gives the collection the freedom to linger in the in-between, tracing a life in motion: a body, a voice, a woman overwintering into something newly whole.