Maya C. Popa is the author of If You Love That Lady, forthcoming from W.W. Norton and Picador in 2026. Her previous collections include Wound is the Origin of Wonder (W.W. Norton 2022; Picador 2023), named one of the Guardian’s Best Books of Poetry. American Faith (Sarabande 2019) was runner-up in the Kathryn A. Morton Prize judged by Ocean Vuong and was awarded the North American Book Prize in 2020. She has received awards from the Poetry Foundation and the Oxford Poetry Society among others. 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, NYU, and Barnard College. Maya 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.