Maria Popova

Maria Popova (Bulgarian: Мария Попова; born 28 July 1984) is a Bulgarian-born, American-based writer of literary and arts commentary and cultural criticism that has found wide appeal (as of 2012, 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. In addition to her writing and related speaking engagements, she has served as an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow, as the editorial director at the higher education social network Lore, and has written for The Atlantic, Wired UK, and other publications. As of 2012, she resided in Brooklyn, New York.