"During her time in graduate school, Hristova melded her raw emotion and inner turmoil into a book-length collection of poems, but decided to let them sit for a while until she had fully processed her feelings. When she revisited her work nearly a year later, one of her close friends urged Hristova to publish her poems. After finding an editor and assembling the manuscript for an e-book, Hristova’s work became reality."

"When I think back on the worst period of my life, it often comes back to me a bit faded in memory. As if I had blacked out repeatedly after drinking too much, or as if my doctor had prescribed me heavy sedatives that affected my brain. The pressure of what I faced was like a printing press—pressing me down underneath a weight until I was crushed, with the stain of my body leaving some beautiful markings on paper."

"Common themes that come up in my work are grief, faith, family, heartbreak, feminism and women’s issues, immigration and other social justice themes. They say that you write about what you know—and of course, I started writing to deal with my own grief and heartbreak after losing my sister to cancer when I was 24 years old. Writing also gave me a reprieve from the emotional issues that came along with my adult relationships. However, my writing reveals much of my personal background as well."

"My latest book is a poetry collection titled The Day My Kisses Tasted Like Disorder. I started it while I was a soon-to-be college graduate musing about feminist issues like street harassment. Eventually, I began writing about the romantic relationship I was involved with at the time, and about the man I was falling in love with. When that relationship ended, the poetry took a tumultuous turn into heartbreak that melted into a depression once I found out my sister was dying, two weeks after my break-up."

"When I first began this book, it was my diary. It helped me heal through the most difficult part of my life. I took the time and effort to craft and edit what I had written during that time period, in order to give it to others so they too can heal. I published the most intimate parts of myself in order to help others going through a heartbreak or losing someone to cancer. I especially wrote it for women, as a lot of the poetry is written through a lamenting, feminist lens."

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"The most powerful thing about it all is that writing gives us the ability to choose how we want to remember events, trauma, and suffering and how we want the world to remember us. We’re only a victim if we write that we are. We can be the hero, the overcomer, the warrior if we write that we are. Writing is the ultimate empowerment tool."