Maya C. Popa (b. 1989) is a Romanian-American writer, academic, and editor currently based in New York.

In 2018, Popa became the first woman to serve as poetry editor of Publishers Weekly, the largest international literary trade publication. She has won numerous awards in poetry, including The Hippocrates Prize, The Gregory O’Donoghue Award, The Magma Poetry Prize, The Alpine Prize, and The Narrative Poetry Prize. 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 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.