We are proud to present a reading by Adrian Matejka & Maya C. Popa.

Adrian Matejka is the author of The Devil’s Garden (Alice James Books, 2003) which won the New York / New England Award and Mixology (Penguin, 2009), a winner of the 2008 National Poetry Series. His third collection, The Big Smoke (Penguin, 2013), was awarded the 2014 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. The Big Smoke was also a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. His fourth collection, Map to the Stars, was published by Penguin in 2017.  His selected poems, Be Easy: New & Selected, was published by Liveright in March 2026.

Maya C. Popa is the author of three poetry collections: If You Love That Lady (W.W. Norton, July 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), winner of the North American Book Prize. Her poems and essays appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, Poetry, The Paris Review, and The Times Literary Supplement, among other publications. She holds a PhD on the role of wonder in poetry from Goldsmiths, University of London, and received her MA at Oxford University and her MFA from NYU. She is the Poetry Editor of Publishers Weekly and the founder of Conscious Writers Collective, a global online writing community for poets and prose writers. Her eponymous newsletter has been one of Substack’s top literature publications since 2023 and reaches over 22,000 subscribers.

In addition to the in-person reading, all Reading & Lecture Series events are streamed live on our website.