Maya C. Popa
Award-winning Poet
Readings &
Lecture Topics
- 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
“One of my generation’s finest poets–a truly peerless voice that realizes itself at such a startlingly scintillating pace. I’m so grateful to be alive alongside Maya C. Popa’s poems, and even more so knowing she’s just getting started.” —Ocean Vuong
“Maya C. Popa is an exquisite master at turning her experiences of the world into light, which she then shines into our own hearts. Reading her poems is such an intimate engagement, like finding a room in your own house that you didn’t even know was there.” —Elizabeth Gilbert
Maya C. Popa is a Romanian-American writer and the author of three poetry collections: If You Love That Lady (W.W. Norton, July 2026), Wound Is the Origin of Wonder (W.W. Norton, 2022)—named one of The Guardian’s best books of poetry—and American Faith (Sarabande, 2019), winner of the North American Book Prize. She holds a PhD on the role of wonder in poetry from Goldsmiths, University of London, and received her MA at Oxford University and her MFA from NYU. Popa’s poems have been commissioned by major institutions and cultural houses, including the United Nations, the Grotte de Lazaret in Nice, France, and Van Cleef & Arpels.
Her poems and essays appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, Poetry, The Paris Review, and The Times Literary Supplement, among others. Her essays have received awards from the Poetry Foundation, and she has written widely on mischaracterized women writers for Poetry, including recent essays on Laura Gilpins, Emily Dickinson, and Jane Kenyon. Her critical writings on wonder in literature have also appeared in The London Magazine and The Poetry Review.
Writer Robert Macfarlane has praised Popa’s work as “an exact and exacting scintillation of thought and image that in sum becomes a shimmer… brilliantly documenting ‘what remains / of this extravagant, fatal, blinking life.’”
Popa is also a leading educator and advocate for expanding access to rigorous literary training. She is the founder of Conscious Writers Collective, a global online writing community for poets and prose writers bridging serious craft instruction with sustainable creative practice beyond the constraints of an MFA. Poet Jane Hirshfield writes, “This community of writers is rigorous, passionate, informed by Maya C. Popa’s depth of craft knowledge as an unparalleled reader and consummate writer.” Poet Ellen Bass adds, “Maya C. Popa is an amazing teacher… she opened up the world of the prose poem in a way that has been important to me ever since.”
Since 2018, Popa has served as Poetry Editor of Publishers Weekly and has taught in the undergraduate and MFA programs at NYU. Her eponymous newsletter has been one of Substack’s top literature publications since 2023 and reaches over 22,000 subscribers.
Short Bio
Maya C. Popa is the author of three poetry collections: If You Love That Lady (W.W. Norton, July 2026), Wound Is the Origin of Wonder (W.W. Norton, 2022), named one of The Guardian’s best books of poetry, and American Faith (Sarabande, 2019), winner of the North American Book Prize. Her poems and essays appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, Poetry, The Paris Review, and The Times Literary Supplement, among other publications. She holds a PhD on the role of wonder in poetry from Goldsmiths, University of London, and received her MA at Oxford University and her MFA from NYU. She is the Poetry Editor of Publishers Weekly and the founder of Conscious Writers Collective, a global online writing community for poets and prose writers. Her eponymous newsletter has been one of Substack’s top literature publications since 2023 and reaches over 22,000 subscribers.
Visit Author WebsiteVideos
Publications
If You Love That Lady: Poems
Poetry, 2026
“How is it possible to find such humor and pleasure in a book that also won’t stop breaking my heart? How can the poems be so formally rigorous at the same time that they feel like I’m talking with a friend, the friend sitting across the table telling you the sacred and brutal everyday story of the heart. These poems are wrought and forged and teach one what the line can do. A gem. This book is a gem. Sourced from the deepest places, then forged and honed, polished and gleaming. I’ve learned something about poetry and myself by reading this book.” —Gabrielle Calvocoressi,
If You Love That Lady is a hymn to the pursuit of the unattainable. The title sequence dramatizes the paradox of correspondence: The private worlds shaped by the act of writing, and the expectant silences that charge our lives. Drawing from nineteenth–century courtship letters, the collection lingers in the rush of love and the resurrection that follows: “Happiness was no small thing, / but neither was its cost.” Delivered with piercing elegance and signature wit — “What a formidable excuse he was. / What a pair of borrowed eyes / with a side of Keats” — these poems teach us that desire, like poetry, depends on revelation and restraint alike.
Part elegy to the passing of impossible things, part ars poetica to the possibility of remaking, If You Love That Lady explores the inventiveness of longing and its relentless drive, proving that what breaks us open at last reveals us to ourselves.
Wound is the Origin of Wonder
Poetry, 2022
A ravishing volume of poems that explore appetite, desire, and our gratitude for one another and the vanishing world.
Award-winning poet Maya C. Popa suggests that our restless desires are inseparable from our mortality in this pressing and precise collection. In lucid, musically rich poems, she appeals to a dwindling natural world and summons moments from the lives of literary forbearers―Milton’s visit to Galileo, a vase broken by Marcel Proust―unveiling fresh wonder in the unlikely meetings of the past. Popa’s poems dramatize the difficulties of loving a world that is at once rich with beauty and full of opportunities for grief, and reveal that the natural arc of wonder, from astonishment to reflection, more deeply connects us with our humanity.
American Faith
Poetry, 2019
The ultimate subject of Maya C. Popa’s stunning debut collection is violence. American Faith begins with its manifestation in our country: a destructive administration, a history of cruelty and extermination, and a love of firearms. The violence naturally extends to the personal. What for some is routine can feel like an assault: a TSA agent wipes down a bra tucked in a traveler’s suitcase, adding, “…prettiest terrorist I’ve seen all day.” Tentatively, the title poem casts light on the unrevealed future, a solution that includes faith: “…the days, impatient, fresh beasts, appeal to me—/ You are here. You must believe in something.”
You Always Wished the Animals Would Leave
Poetry, 2018
“In Maya Catherine Popa’s You Always Wished the Animals Would Leave, feathers are unfulfilled parables, a hen’s eggs turn a vicious red, and a super moon “blooms a tyranny of flowers.” A helix of histories lies threaded to both the present day and the various magics of night. These poems are smart and lush, and at the end of each of them my heart, mind, and ear argue over which was lavished with the most pleasure. I am enchanted by this book, in its thrall, its bright gravity, its terribilitá.” –Traci Brimhall
The Bees Have Been Canceled
Poetry, 2017
“The poems in The Bees Have Been Canceled are ravenous, rich, and exquisitely built. Maya Catherine Popa’s language makes visible how yearning tethers the mind to the world and how hurt spawns an astonishing self-awareness. Her gaze alights on beauty and violence; it ‘scurries from birth to blight.’ Such attentive looking brings closer the brokenness of the world. This gaze is also restorative; it alleviates and mends and delights.” –Eduardo C. Corral
Articles & Audio
Read What’s In Print
• Writing Through the Dark: Poetry 2021 by Maya C. Popa – Publishers Weekly
• Review of American Faith by Maya C. Popa – Publishers Weekly
Selected Writings
• Read “Dear Life” by Maya C Popa – The Guardian
• Read “My Brother Doesn’t Wake Up Wishing We Were Closer” – The Adroit Journal
• Read “When Verse Goes Viral” – Publishers Weekly
LETTER TO NOAH’S WIFE
You are never mentioned on Ararat
or elsewhere, but I know a woman’s hand
in salvation when I see it. Lately,
I’m torn between despair and ignorance.
I’m not a vegetarian, shop plastic,
use an air conditioner. Is this what happens
before it all goes fluvial? Do the selfish
grow self-conscious by the withering
begonias? Lately, I worry every black dress
will have to be worn to a funeral.
New York a bouillon, eroded filigree.
Anything but illness, I beg the plagues,
but shiny crows or nuclear rain.
Not a drop in London May through June.
I bask in the wilt by golden hour light.
Lately, only lately, it is late. Tucking
our families into the safeties of the past.
My children, will they exist by the time
it’s irreversible? Will they live
astonished at the thought of ice
not pulled from the mouth of a machine?
Which parent will be the one to break
the myth; the Arctic wasn’t Sisyphus’s
snowy hill. Noah’s wife, I am wringing
my hands not knowing how to know
and move forward. Was it you
who gathered flowers once the earth
had dried? How did you explain the light
to all the animals?
