In his work as a writer and editor of fiction, nonfiction, film, criticism, and journalism, Nathaniel Popkin explores memory and loss: urban and historical change, architectural palimpsests, ecological grief, and the struggle for the democratic ideal. His three novels and three books of nonfiction interrogate these themes with moral complexity and intellectual range. The Year of the Return (Open Books, 2019) revisits bicentennial Philadelphia, a place of profound social unrest, to tell the story of a Jewish family and an African American family, united by marriage then by grief. In Everything Is Borrowed (New Door Books, 2018), Popkin explores regret and shame, with dual narratives of two men of the same name: one a contemporary architect, the other a Jewish anarchist of another era. His first novel, Lion and Leopard (The Head and The Hand Press, 2013) examines duplicity and originality among the earliest American artists, and was a finalist for the Foreword Reviews Indie Book of the Year Award. Popkin is the co-editor (with Stephanie Feldman) of an anthology, Who Will Speak for America? (Temple University Press, 2018), which brings together a range of exceptional literary voices in response to the degradation of American politics. He was also a co-organizer of Writers Resist, and is part of a group relaunching it as a national literary protest in 2020 honoring the life and work of Toni Morrison. He turned his attention to the climate crisis in 2018, describing the present era as an “age of loss” in an essay for The New York Times. In 2019, Popkin helped pilot The Valley of the Possible, a research program and residency in southern Chile that asks artists to frame new human responses to deforestation, species extinction, and the ongoing effects of colonization. He is also the curator of the 2020 Live and Learn and Chatauqua book series commemorating the 100th and 150th anniversaries of the 15th and 19th amendments through the work of contemporary authors and poet, novelist, and essayist Frances Harper. Popkin is co-founder of the web magazine Hidden City Daily and the founding reviews editor of Cleaver Magazine. His literary criticism and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Kenyon Review, LitHub, Tablet, Public Books, and Rain Taxi, among many other publications. As a close observer of Philadelphia and American urban history, Popkin has sought a fresh way to understand urban change through layers of human endeavor. His book Finding the Hidden City (Temple University Press, 2017), written with Peter Woodall and photographer Joseph E.B. Elliott, follows The Possible City (Camino Books, 2008) and Song of the City (Four Walls Eight Windows-Basic Books, 2002). Popkin is writer of the forthcoming docu-series American Experiment: The Struggle for Philadelphia and the film Sisters in Freedom, on a multi-racial group of abolitionist women of the 1830s, winner of the 2019 Mid-Atlantic Emmy for best documentary. He was the guest architecture critic of the Philadelphia Inquirer from 2011-12.