Author Bio's
Priyanka Kumar is the author of Conversations with Birds, which has received wide acclaim. Her essays and criticism appear in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Orion, and High Country News. Her work has been featured on CBS News Radio, Psychology Today, and Oprah Daily. She is a recipient of a Playa Residency, an Aldo & Estella Leopold Writing Residency, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Award, a New Mexico/New Visions Governor’s Award, a Canada Council for the Arts Grant, an Ontario Arts Council Literary Award, and an Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences Fellowship. Kumar holds an MFA from the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts and is an alumna of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She wrote, directed and produced the feature documentary The Song of the Little Road, starring Martin Scorsese and Ravi Shankar—which premiered at the Telluride Film Festival and is in the permanent collection of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. Kumar has taught at the University of California Santa Cruz and the University of Southern California, and serves on the Board of Directors at the Leopold Writing Program.
Priyanka recently spoke with Mark Lynch for Inquiry, a program on the Worcester, Massachusetts, NPR affiliate station, 90.5 WICN. She spoke with him about Conversations with Birds and her novel.
Take Wing and Fly Here
Featured Books
Conversations with Birds
Tracing her movements across the American West, this stirring collection of essays brings the avian world richly to life. Kumar’s perspective is not that of a list keeper, counting and cataloguing species. Rather, from the mango-colored western tanager that rescues her from a bout of altitude sickness in Sequoia National Park to ancient sandhill cranes in the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, and from the snowy plovers building shallow nests with bits of shell and grass to the white-breasted nuthatch that regularly visits the apricot tree behind her family’s casita in Sante Fe, for Kumar, birds “become a portal to a more vivid, enchanted world.”
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Take Wing and Fly Here is the first novel in Priyanka Kumar's New West Trilogy, which explores our changing relationship with the outdoors in the American West. Set in Southern California, this delightful novel about birding tells the story of a Ph.D. candidate in physics whose life begins to unravel after he takes on a Big Year challenge. J.K.'s main competitor is the president of the oldest birding society in America, which is facing bankruptcy in its Centennial year. A brilliant, tightly woven narrative about ambition and fraught relationships, all while pursuing birds in the beautiful California hills and coast.
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