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. 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 literary education. She is the founder of Conscious Writers Collective, a global online 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.”

Popa is the Poetry Editor of Publishers Weekly and teaches in the undergraduate and MFA programs at NYU. Her newsletter has been one of Substack’s top literature publications since 2023 and reaches over 22,000 subscribers.

She is represented by Peter Straus at RCW (UK) and Michael Taeckens at Massie & McQuilkin (US). For speaking engagements, please contact Blue Flower Arts.