Maya C. Popa

Award-winning Poet

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  • An Evening with Maya C. Popa

Biography

“Maya C. Popa’s poems move with a confident, quick-as-dread sweep toward an alarmingly clear articulation of what it is to be an American.” –Mark Doty 

“Subtle and gorgeous. The ecstatic language of Maya C. Popa’s meditations and confessions is animated as much by pain as by joy.” ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Maya C. Popa’s writing is haunted by violence and catastrophe, by the consequences of human desire turned to incommensurate ends, and anxious about the resources of language. Popa’s work is serious, but there’s joy here, too, in a balance that defies gravity.” –Averill Curdy

Maya C. Popa is a Romanian-American poet and, most recently, the author of Wound is the Origin of Wonder (W. W. Norton, 2022), a finalist for the 2023 Levis reading prize from VCU. “They are Building a Hospital” from the collection appeared on the On Being podcast hosted by Pádraig Ó Tuoma. Her first full-length collection, American Faith (Sarabande, 2019), was a recipient of the North American Book Prize and a runner-up in the Kathryn A. Morton Prize judged by Ocean Vuong. She is also the author of two chapbooks, both from the Diagram Chapbook Series: You Always Wished the Animals Would Leave and The Bees Have Been Canceled, which was a PBS Summer Choice.

About American Faith, Deborah Landau says, “Maya Popa’s clear-eyed lyrics register with steady power a spectrum of 21st century violences. In poems that take on the devastating pressure of climate change, gun violence, and our threatened democracy, Popa uses her gift to grieve and in grieving forge song. Revelatory yet emphatically unsentimental, Popa’s unflinching distillations illuminate the facets of our broken world; there is much wisdom here, and grace, and heart.” And of her most recent collection, Kaveh Akbar observes, “I am stuck in an almost life, / in an almost time,’ Maya C. Popa writes in the titular poem from Wound Is the Origin of Wonder. Suspended in the uncanny amber of such a time, such a place, we readers encounter ourselves, endlessly reprocessing our own pasts and worrying our futures as the vast roiling moment corrodes both. Still, Popa insists upon, if not hope exactly, then a world beyond the hopelessness this one inspires: ‘There are still things that cannot be imagined.’ Wound Is the Origin of Wonder is a complex, searching collection, one I will be returning to for years.”

In 2021, Popa she was commissioned by The United Nations to write a poem and deliver the opening remarks for the International Day of the Girl Conference. Her poetry was featured on a Louis Vuitton trunk for the Visionaries 200-Year Anniversary campaign. Her newsletter, Poetry Today, was named a 2023 Substack Featured Publication.

Popa is the recipient of awards from the Poetry Foundation, the Oxford Poetry Society, the Hippocrates Society in London, and the Munster Literature Centre in Cork, Ireland, among others. She is the Poetry Reviews Editor at Publishers Weekly and teaches poetry at NYU. She is director of creative writing at the Nightingale-Bamford school where she oversees visiting writers, workshops, and readings.

She holds a PhD on the role of wonder in poetry from Goldsmiths, University of London, where she was a recipient of a department bursary for exceptional merit. She has been invited to speak on the role of wonder in poetry at Oxford University and elsewhere.

Short Bio

Maya C. Popa is the author of two collections, Wound is the Origin of Wonder (W.W. Norton, 2022) named one of the Guardian’srecent best books of poetry, and American Faith (Sarabande, 2019), runner-up in the Kathryn A. Morton Prize judged by Ocean Vuong and winner of the North American Book Prize. Her poems and essays appear in The Atlantic, the Nation, Poetry, the Paris Review, the Times Literary Supplement and elsewhere. She holds a PhD on the role of wonder in poetry from Goldsmiths, University of London, where she was a recipient of the English department bursary for exceptional merit. She was previously a Clarendon Scholar at Oxford University, where she reserved her MA, and a Veterans Fellows at NYU, where she earned her MFA. Her newsletter, Poetry Today, is one of Substack’s best-selling featured publications. Since 2018, she has served as the Poetry Editor of Publishers Weekly and Director of Creative Writing at the Nightingale-Bamford School. She teaches advanced poetry at NYU.

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