Maya C. Popa

Maya C. Popa (b. 1989) is a Romanian-American writer, academic, and editor currently based in
New York.

In 2018, Popa became the first woman to serve as poetry editor of Publishers Weekly, the largest
international literary trade publication. She has won numerous awards in poetry, including The
Hippocrates Prize, The Gregory O’Donoghue Award, The Magma Poetry Prize, The Alpine Prize,
and The Narrative Poetry Prize.

The daughter of political refugees, she has served on the Board of the Bella Abzug Leadership
Institute and in 2021 was commissioned by the UN Girls Education Initiative to write
and deliver the opening remarks in the form of a poem for the UN International Day of the Girl.

A former Oxford University Clarendon Scholar, her criticism has received awards from The Poetry
Foundation (Chicago) and appears widely, including in the TLS, Poetry, the Poetry Review, and the
London Magazine. Her MA and PhD research focus on how heightened states of attention, induced
by crises of faith and by wonder respectively, spurred Romantic and Victorian poets to generate
formally innovative works. She is currently completing her PhD at Goldsmiths, where she is the
recipient of an English Department Bursary Award for outstanding merit. She teaches at NYU and
elsewhere.