She relocated to attend the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned a degree in communications, though for years, up to 2012, her grandmother had wanted her to get an MBA. Popova graduated from the American College of Sofia in Bulgaria, a secondary school, in 2003. As recounted in interview to Geoff Wolinetz of, Popova first worked when she was about 8 years old, making the Bulgarian yarn folk art dolls called martenitsas, worn beginning on the first of March where Popova describes selling them on the street as children would sell drinks at a lemonade stand. In interview, Popova states that in childhood, one of her grandmothers often read to her from a collection of encyclopedias. an engineering student who later became an Apple salesman. Popova's parents are ethnic Bulgarians who, as noted by Bruce Feiler for The New York Times, 'met as teenage exchange students in Russia. Maria Popova was born on 28 July 1984 in Bulgaria.

She is the creator of 'The Universe in Verse', a large-scale annual celebration of science and the natural world through poetry. Since 2010, she has resided in Brooklyn, New York. 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 New York Times, The Atlantic, Wired UK, and other publications. The blog, renamed to The Marginalian upon its 15th birthday in 2021, features her writing on books, the arts, philosophy, culture, and other subjects. In 2006, she started the blog Brain Pickings, an online publication that she has fought to maintain advertisement-free.

Maria Popova ( Bulgarian: Мария Попова born 28 July 1984) is a Bulgarian-born, American-based essayist, book author, poet, and writer of literary and arts commentary and cultural criticism that has found wide appeal both for her writing and for the visual stylistics that accompany it.

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