Maria Popova

Maria Popova (Bulgarian: Мария Попова; born 28 July 1984) is a Bulgarian-born writer, blogger, literary and cultural critic living in Brooklyn, New York. She is known for her speeches and her blog BrainPickings.org, which features her writing on culture, books, philosophy and eclectic subjects on and off the Internet. 2Early life Popova's parents are ethnic Bulgarians who met in Russia when they were both foreign exchange students in the early 1980s. Popova was born in Bulgaria in 1984. Her mother studied library science, while her father studied engineering and eventually became an Apple salesman. During Popova's childhood, one of her grandmothers often read to her from a collection of encyclopedias. Because of her influence, Popova was exposed to a vast amount of knowledge at a young age, which fueled her curiosity about the world. Popova first worked when she was 8 years old, making martenitsas having set up a lemonade stand-esque shop on the street to sell them. 3Education and work Popova graduated from the American College of Sofia in Bulgaria in 2003. She attended the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned a degree in Communications, though her grandmother wanted her to get an MBA. Popova paid for her tuition by working four part-time jobs on top of a full college course load: as an advertising representative for The Daily Pennsylvanian, as an intern for a local writer, as an employee for a work-study job at the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, and as a staff member for a small start-up advertising agency in Philadelphi