Who am I?
I’m Maya C. Popa, a Romanian-American writer, editor, and teacher.
A few things about me:
I’m the Poetry Editor of Publishers Weekly and teach at NYU and elsewhere.
I’m also the author of two collections of poetry, Wound is the Origin of Wonder and American Faith.
I teach poetry craft classes and workshops over Zoom. These focus on the best parts of courses I’ve taught over my 10+ years as a classroom teacher and professor, and what I learned from spectacular mentors at Oxford, Harvard, Goldsmiths, NYU, and Barnard (I really like school, can you tell…).
What this newsletter offers you:
Here, I talk about my great passions for poetry, wonder, and mindset, with a nice helping of apocryphal and weird literary stuff (see: Emily Dickinson’s gingerbread recipe) sprinkled in.
I am committed to debunking the notion that academic research or writing has to be inaccessible or riddled with jargon. So, most Wednesdays, I offer a look at a different element of my PhD research into the role of wonder in literature. On Fridays, I curate PoetryRx, a round up of 10 poems based on a particular situation or condition. For example, “Poems to treat the winter blues.”