Maya Popa is a Romanian-American writer, journalist and academic, born in 1989. Her first published collection of poems was American Faith in 2019, which won the North American Book Prize. Wound is the Origin of Wonder is her second published collection. 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 was 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.

Whitman declared ‘what I assume you shall assume’ and Popa’s audacious reply is to transcend deadlock and reveal beauty wherever her gently subversive lyric freely wanders, with phrases freshly minted in lines whose intensity is as impactful and affirmative as lived experience.

Maya Popa is a Romanian-American writer, journalist and academic, born in 1989. Her first published collection of poems was American Faith in 2019, which won the North American Book Prize. Wound is the Origin of Wonder is her second published collection. 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 was 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.

Whitman declared ‘what I assume you shall assume’ and Popa’s audacious reply is to transcend deadlock and reveal beauty wherever her gently subversive lyric freely wanders, with phrases freshly minted in lines whose intensity is as impactful and affirmative as lived experience.

Maya Popa is a Romanian-American writer, journalist and academic, born in 1989. Her first published collection of poems was American Faith in 2019, which won the North American Book Prize. Wound is the Origin of Wonder is her second published collection. 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 was 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.

Whitman declared ‘what I assume you shall assume’ and Popa’s audacious reply is to transcend deadlock and reveal beauty wherever her gently subversive lyric freely wanders, with phrases freshly minted in lines whose intensity is as impactful and affirmative as lived experience.