About

Nathaniel Popkin is a writer of the American urban experience, a narrator of the messy and violent ambition of the city street.  According to Tom Sugrue of the University of Pennsylvania, Popkin is “a visionary with two feet on the ground, a poet who finds verse in the everyday.”

Descriptive and optimistic like Walt Whitman, Popkin combines literary scope with a keen understanding of urban policy, architecture, and history. Trained as a city planner at Penn’s Graduate School of Design (’94), Popkin’s writing often takes the reader onto the street, exploring the space where the built environment meets the metaphysical city of culture, ideas, and religion.

His 2002 book Song of the City: An Intimate History of the American Urban Landscape (Four Walls Eight Windows) and his 2008 book The Possible City: Exercises in Dreaming Philadelphia (Camino Books) have garnered generous praise from scholars and writers alike.

Philadelphia Inquirer book critic Carlin Romano called Song of the City “exquisitely literary … electric.”  In Metropolitan Philadelphia: Living in the Presence of the Past, historian Steve Conn wrote that Song of the City is “the finest book about contemporary Philadelphia I have come across.”  The book was chosen in 2007 as required text for Philadelphia University’s “First Year Experience” program. The novelist Beth Kephart, author of Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River, calls Popkin’s writing “profoundly beautiful, often surprising.”

Popkin is currently the senior writer for the documentary film series “Philadelphia: The Great Experiment” and the co-editor of the Hidden City Daily. He is currently at work on I Will Flood You, a novel about the tragic death of the painter John Lewis Krimmel.

In 2009, Popkin was named a fellow by the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

Along with his wife Rona Buchalter, Popkin co-owns Bella Properties, LLC, a small real estate management firm. They have two children and live in Philadelphia.