Georgia A. Popoff

Georgia A. Popoff was born in Belleville, Illinois, in 1953. She is the author of Living with Haints (Tiger Bark Press, 2024); Psychometry, (Tiger Bark Press, 2019), a finalist for Utica College’s Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize and the recipient of the Central New York (CNY) Book Award for Poetry; Psalter: The Agnostic’s Book of Common Curiosities (Tiger Bark Press, 2015); The Doom Weaver (Main Street Rag Publishers, 2008); and Coaxing Nectar from Longing (Hale Mary Press, 1997). 

Popoff also coauthored Our Difficult Sunlight: A Guide to Poetry, Literacy, & Social Justice in Classroom & Community (Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 2011), with Quraysh Ali Lansana, which was a 2012 NAACP Image Award finalist. In 2017, Popoff also coedited, alongside Lansana, The Whiskey of Our Discontent: Gwendolyn Brooks as Conscience & Change Agent (Haymarket Books, 2017), which was a finalist for the Chicago Review of Books Award in Nonfiction and the recipient of the CNY Book Award for Nonfiction. She has also been honored with the National League of American Pen Women’s 2021 Vinnie Ream Award in Letters for an excerpt from Living with Haints.

Popoff is also a writer, editor, arts-in-education specialist, and program coordinator for the YMCA of Central New York’s Writers Voice and Downtown Writers Center, where she teaches poetry and creative nonfiction. She served on the editorial board of the Comstock Review for twenty years and as its managing editor for five years. She is the series editor for the University of Michigan Press’s Under Discussion book series on contemporary poets, founded by Donald Hall. 

A resident of Syracuse, New York, for most of her life, Popoff was named poet laureate of Onondaga County in 2022. In 2024, she received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship.