He was nominated for the Nebula and Sturgeon Awards for the short story "The Color Winter" (1988).
[1] He attended the Clarion Writers Workshop in 1978,[2][3] and his first story, "A Capella Blues", was published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine in May 1982.
[1] One of his more acclaimed stories, "The Egg" (Asimov's, January 1989)[6] is set in the future Boston history, and was later incorporated into his short novel Slow Lightning (1991).
His other novels include Caliban Landing (1987), Welcome to Witchlandia (2016), God's Country (2020), Jackie's Boy (2020), Danse Mécanique (2021) and House of Birds (2021).
Popkes was part of the Readercon panels "Global Warming and Science Fiction" (2010) and "Have We Lost the Future?"