🎙 INTERVIEW: Wonder, Longing, and the Making of a Poetic Life with Maya C. Popa
​** This is a LIVE interview with Maya C. Popa about the craft of writing and reality of building a creative career.**
​How do you write about desire without collapsing into confession? What gives a poem its charge?
​Dr. Maya C. Popa is the author of three poetry collections, including Wound Is the Origin of Wonder—named one of The Guardian’s best poetry books of the year—and the prize-winning American Faith. Her new collection, If You Love That Lady, is a hymn to the pursuit of the unattainable: a book that lingers in correspondence, desire, silence, and the tension between revelation and restraint.
​Drawing from nineteenth-century courtship letters, the title sequence explores the paradox of writing itself—how private worlds are shaped in the act of address, and how what remains unsaid charges the poem with energy. Part elegy for impossible things, part ars poetica for reinvention, the collection asks what happiness costs, and what survives its passing.
​Popa’s poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, Poetry, and The Times Literary Supplement, among many others. She is Poetry Editor of Publishers Weekly, teaches at NYU, and is the founder of Conscious Writers Collective, a global community dedicated to rigorous craft and sustainable creative practice beyond the traditional MFA model.
​Join us for a conversation with Maya C. Popa about crafting charged poems and writing her new collection If You Love That Lady.
​We’ll also explore:
​Crafting poems that depend equally on revelation and restraint
​Moving between personal lyric, literary history, and ars poetica
​Balancing editorial work, teaching, and one’s own creative practice
​Building a global writing community grounded in rigor and generosity
​Sustaining ambition in poetry in a culture of speed and distraction
​The role of wonder as both aesthetic stance and daily discipline
​About Maya C Popa
​Maya C. Popa is a Romanian American poet. She holds a PhD on the role of wonder in poetry from Goldsmiths, University of London, where she was a recipient of a department bursary for exceptional merit, and previous degrees from Oxford University, New York University, and Barnard College.Â
​Popa is the author of If You Love that Lady (W. W. Norton, 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), a runner-up for the Kathryn A. Morton Prize, judged by Ocean Vuong, and winner of the North American Book Prize in 2020. She has also received awards from the Poetry Foundation and the Oxford Poetry Society. Â
​Popa is the poetry reviews editor at Publishers Weekly and is the founder of Conscious Writers Collective, where she teaches and oversees all literary programming for poets and prose writers. She lives in New York City.
​Your London Writers' Salon Hosts:
​Parul Bavishi and Matt Trinetti are the co-founders of the London Writers' Salon, creators of the webby-nominated Writers' Hour daily writing sessions, and hosts of the London Writers' Salon podcast.
​Parul Bavishi has been an editor for over a decade. In addition to running LWS she helps thriller, YA and non-fiction writers level up their craft and get published. She writes and edits for the Story Grid. She has worked as an editor and literary scout at Random House, Quercus & Eccles Fisher. She analyses TV hit shows (Killing Eve, Ozark, Game of Thrones) on the Story Grid Showrunners Podcast.
​Matt Trinetti is a writer, publisher, TEDx speaker, and facilitator. In addition to running LWS, Matt designs programs to help unfulfilled professionals pursue creative work, start businesses, and reinvent their careers. Matt's work has appeared in Quartz, Observer, Creative Mornings, and on his blog GiveLiveExplore.
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