Zlatina is graduate student in her fourth year, and she is originally from Bulgaria. Zlatina completed an undergraduate double major in Rhetoric and Mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley and received a master's degree in Comparative Literature with an emphasis on Latin American literatures at San Francisco State University. Her thesis examined the function of time and memory in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo.

Zlatina's primary interests are Russian city prose of the 1970s and '80s and her secondary field is 20th-century American literary influences in Russia. She also has an interest in Soviet influences in Mexico at the beginning of the 20th century.