Maria Popova

Maria Popova is a Bulgarian-born, American-based writer of literary and arts commentary and cultural criticism that has found wide appeal (3 million page views and more than 1 million monthly readers), both for its writing and for the visual stylistics that accompany it. She is most widely known for her blog, Brain Pickings, an online publication that she has fought to maintain advertisement-free, which features her writing on books, and ideas from the arts, philosophy, culture, and other subjects. Founded in 2006 as a weekly email to seven friends, eventually brought online and now included in the Library of Congress permanent web archive, it is a record of her own becoming as a person — intellectually, creatively, spiritually, poetically — drawn from my extended marginalia on the search for meaning across literature, science, art, philosophy, and the various other tentacles of human thought and feeling.

She is also the author of a book titled Figuring and the editor of an eight-year labor titled A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader. She has at times thought in words for The New York Times, Wired, and The Atlantic, among others.