Book Launch of "The Light Between Apple Trees" by Priyanka Kumar

Join us Thursday Sept 25th, at 5pm at Garcia Street Books for the launch of "The Light Between Apple Trees"

As a child in the foothills of the Himalayas, Priyanka Kumar was entranced by forest-like orchards of diverse and luscious fruit—especially apples. These biodiverse orchards seemed worlds away from the cardboard apples that lined supermarket shelves in the United States. Yet on a small patch of woods near her home in Santa Fe, Kumar discovered a wild apple tree—and the seeds of an odyssey were planted. Could the taste of a feral apple offer a doorway to the wild?

In The Light Between Apple Trees, Kumar takes us on a dazzling and transformative journey to rediscover apples, brilliantly weaving together science and childhood memories with the apple’s storied history. The Light Between Apple Trees is a lyric odyssey that will forever change how you look at an “apple a day.” Kumar shows how—if we follow untamed paths—the tang and texture of an apple can lead us back to the wild.

Priyanka Kumar is a nationally-acclaimed naturalist and the author of Conversations with Birds,

praised as “a landmark book” that “could help people around the world rewild their hearts and

souls” (Psychology Today). She profoundly reenvisions our place in Nature—and Nature’s place

in our hearts—and has been compared to Rachel Carson.

Kumar’s new book The Light Between Apple Trees: Rediscovering the Wild Through a

Beloved American Fruit has been praised as “environmental writing at its best” (Joan

Strassmann). Kumar’s essays appear in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles

Review of Books, and Sierra magazine, and she has been featured on CBS, Oprah Daily, and Yale

Climate Connections. She holds an MFA from the University of Southern California’s School of

Cinematic Arts and is an alumna of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

Kumar has taught at the University of California Santa Cruz, and serves on the Advisory Council

of the Leopold Writing Program. Her feature documentary, The Song of the Little Road, is in the

permanent collection of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. Her awards include

an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Award, a New Mexico/New Visions Governor’s Award, an

International Center for Jefferson Studies Fellowship, and an Academy of Motion Pictures Arts

and Sciences Fellowship.