Priyanka

Kumar

Acclaimed Naturalist and author of Nonfiction & Fiction

ohn Burroughs Medal Finalist and Award-Winning Filmmaker

Travels from: Santa Fe, NM

“A delightful ode to birds and a powerful defense of the planet we share with them…. An eloquent depiction of how birding engenders a deep love of our ecosystems and a more profound understanding of ourselves.” — Kirkus Reviews

Priyanka Kumar is the critically-acclaimed author of Conversations with Birds and Take Wing and Fly Here. Her essays and criticism appear in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Huffington Post, and High Country News. A lifelong naturalist, she is deeply passionate about birds and wild animals—and about restoring their ecosystems and stemming biodiversity loss. Her vivid stories about her fieldtrips in the wild and her reflections “inspire and enlighten” (Publishers Weekly) and are “a powerful defense of the planet we share with (animals).” (Kirkus Reviews)

She is a recipient of the Aldo & Estella Leopold Writing Residency, the Playa 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.

She has lectured and written widely on environmental and social justice issues, and was featured on CBS New Radio and interviewed at length for shows such as The Last Word with Abigail Adler, In This Climate, and What Matters Most.

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 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's Featured Titles

Conversations With Birds

Milkweed Editions |

November 8, 2022

Nonfiction

“Birds are my almanac. They tune me into the seasons, and into myself.” So begins this lively collection of essays by acclaimed filmmaker and novelist Priyanka Kumar. Growing up at the feet of the Himalayas in northern India, Kumar took for granted her immersion in a lush natural world. After moving to North America as a teenager, she found herself increasingly distanced from more than human life, and discouraged by the civilization she saw contributing to its destruction. It was only in her twenties, living in Los Angeles and working on films, that she began to rediscover her place in the landscape — and in the cosmos — by way of watching 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.” At a time when climate change, habitat loss, and the reckless use of pesticides are causing widespread extinction of species, Kumar’s reflections on these messengers from our distant past and harbingers of our future offer luminous evidence of her suggestion that “seeds of transformation lie dormant in all of our hearts. Sometimes it just takes the right bird to awaken us.”

Animals & Wildlife, Black Voices, Nonfiction

Take Wing and Fly Here

Sherman Asher Publishing |

July 1, 2013

Fiction

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.

Animals & Wildlife, BIPOC Representation, Environmental Concerns, Fiction

Conversations With Birds

From a mango-colored western tanager in Sequoia National Park to ancient sandhill cranes in the Bosque del Apache Wildlife Refuge to the white-breasted nuthatch that visits her in Sante Fe, for Kumar, birds are “a portal to a more vivid, enchanted world.” At a time when climate change, habitat loss, and the reckless use of pesticides are causing widespread extinction of species, Kumar’s reflections on these messengers from our distant past and harbingers of our future offer luminous evidence of her suggestion that “seeds of transformation lie dormant in all of our hearts. Sometimes it just takes the right bird to awaken us.”

Our Fragmented Attention Span And The Fragmentation of Nature

The 21^st century might well become infamous for shattering what remains of our ability to concentrate—an overreliance on technology fragments our attention in the same way that thoughtless industrialization and development fragmented the natural world. This talk explores how we might move toward healing our attention and nature herself.

Birds And Their Ecosystems

In a time of climate crisis, we can no longer think of birds in isolation without also considering their ecosystems—the web of plant and animal communities they depend on. This talk delves into what the burrowing owl and the long-billed curlew can teach us about restoring grasslands, and how the northern goshawk can point the way to protecting old-growth forests.

The Playing Lives of Birds

This talk explores the fascinating world of bird play, whether it is the solo play of an orange-crowned warbler, the object play of a scrub jay, or the social play of juvenile bald eagles. Scientific research shows that birds who engage in play, especially social play, have the largest brain mass, relative to body size, and even the longest life spans. Could these findings have implications for how play impacts human brains and lifespans?

Reading the Natural World and Deriving Joy from It

Listeners are invited to think about what it means to read the natural world and derive joy from it. Can we cultivate a greater oneness—physical and psychological—with nature? The crises that birds are experiencing in the age of climate change underscore that we need to transform the way we live on this planet. Paradoxically, watching an elusive green-tailed towhee take its sweet time exploring a garden can also inspire us to stay in this moment, to be fully alive to the here and now. If we are going to do the hard work of reversing the damage we have caused, can finding joy in nature be a part of it?

The Light Between Apple Trees

We are finally talking about global warming and drought, but how are extreme fluctuations in temperature and precipitation convulsing the land? We journey to historic orchards where apple trees go on braiding lives across generations but we also meet a veteran farmer who has grown apple and pear trees for decades and won’t be planting any more trees. In a time of crisis, what does it mean to live a life that engages with the land? For if we aren’t reading the land, how can we feel its rhythms? How can we know how those rhythms are changing with global warming?

Wanted: A Climate-Ready Garden

An epiphany in 2009 made Kumar desire a mature garden thrumming with pollinators and native plants. But the Southwest has been in a megadrought since 2000 and, after returning from an overseas trip in 2013, she found her own garden devastated. This talk explores how we can cultivate resilient and climate-ready gardens, focusing not only on xeric plants with low-water needs, but also on perennial edibles and climate-ready trees.

Eco Fiction: Its Beginnings

We will journey through literary landscapes beginning with eastern mythological stories and moving on to Dante and the novels of Jens Peter Jacobson, who was a major influence on the poet Rainer Marie Rilke. These might be surprising figures and stories to consider in the context of eco fiction, but we will explore what they teach us about the art of seeing and storying the natural world.

What Martin Luther King jr. Learned from Gandhi

“To other countries I may go as a tourist, but to India I come as a pilgrim.” This is not a quote from George Harrison. It’s what Martin Luther King Jr. said when he visited India in 1959. This talk will explore how Gandhi inspired King to pursue the path of nonviolence. Why King saw himself as a pilgrim to India is relevant not only to the American Civil Rights Movement, but also to the chronic violence that plagues us today.

What the Long-billed Curlew and the Burrowing Owl Can Teach Us About Ecosystems

In this talk and slide-show, we will explore how birds such as the wondrous curlew and the secretive owl live in a community of animals and how this way of living can be mutually beneficial. We will focus on a particular ecosystem and its animals before circling back to the concept of community—how our lives are not separate but deeply connected.

“I savored CONVERSATIONS WITH BIRDS, reading one chapter at a time and some chapters more than once. I was drawn to keep reading, but I also wanted to slow down and really enjoy the delicious passages and gorgeous pictures you painted — what a rare gift you have. I love how you weave your whole life into the pages, teaching your reader not only about nature and birds, but also about leading a rich and full life and passing lessons and passion to your children. So wise.” — Deb Caldwell, Executive Director, Friends of Bosque del Apache, 2024

“Thank you so very much for taking time to speak with our group today. I admire this beautiful book so much, and also your clarity and ability to engage the audience so kindly and thoughtfully as you discussed so many important, interconnected issues. What a fantastic talk!” — North Carolina Wildlife Federation

“Priyanka Kumar lovingly narrates how encounters with birds have molded her outlook on life, family, and nature, bridging the mountains of her childhood in India to her adult wanderings in California and New Mexico. A spark was Kumar’s chance “mango-colored bird” sighting—a Western Tanager—that stirs her to “aliveness” during a near-death experience; her powerful musings take off from there. Her writing is full of beauty but also tells of destruction of the interconnected ecosystems that sustain birds and people. “Sometimes it just takes the right bird to awaken us,” she writes.” — National Audubon Society

“In this collection of elegant and evocative essays, a novelist reflects on the beauty and significance of birds, those animals that “become a portal to a more vivid, enchanted world.” — The New York Times

“Priyanka Kumar’s outstanding and profoundly moving book Conversations with Birds … could help people around the world rewild their hearts and souls…. (A) landmark, most timely book.” — Psychology Today

“This isn’t just a book about birds, it’s a look at the joy and curiosity we feel when we build connections with the natural world…. With gorgeously descriptive language, (Kumar) shares her fascinating discoveries about birds and uses them as a gateway to explore topics like climate change, racism, and spirituality. For anyone feeling lost in our increasingly complicated human world, Conversations With Birds is just the compass you need.” — Apple, November Best Books of the Month

“The essays in Conversations With Birds are rendered in finely wrought prose, steeped in memory and thrumming with endless curiosity about nature.” — BookPage (starred review)

“A bird the color of mangoes, a beachcomber with a crescent-moon bill, the owl who controls the dark side of nature: in unforgettable encounters with feathered neighbors like these, Priyanka Kumar charts the life-changing surprise and splendor that birds can bring. They open the heart. They widen the soul. For Kumar, a peripatetic filmmaker and often a stranger in a strange land, birds have revealed connection and created wholeness. How grateful I am for the chance to join this generous author’s lyrical, intimate, and revelatory conversations with birds!” — Sy Montgomery, author of The Soul of an Octopus

“Birds have guided Priyanka Kumar through danger, loss, joy, and change. In her moving collection of elegant essays, Conversations with Birds, she recounts her close encounters with cranes and curlews, owls and tanagers, generously sharing their wisdom and her own.” — Michelle Nijhuis, author

“This engaging novel uses the social backdrop of the diverse, colorful and competitive California birding scene to explore the emotional and dynamic side of human relations and human ambition. You don’t need to be a birder to get caught up in the story; be warned you will likely become one before you are through.” — Pete Dunne, Director, Cape May Bird Observatory & author

“Priyanka Kumar’s graceful and unusual work reminds us, again, of everything we lose with each insult to the natural world. Conversations with Birds is a wonderful read!” — Andrea Barrett, author

“Novelist Kumar (Take Wing and Fly Here) wows in this sparkling exploration of her relationship with the birds that serve as her “almanac” and help her tune “in to the seasons” and to herself. Kumar’s reflections are rendered in elegant prose and are rich with vivid descriptions. . . . These outstanding reflections will inspire and enlighten, and are perfect for readers of Diane Ackerman.” — Publishers Weekly

Priyanka Kumar’s Upcoming Events

Honors, Awards & Recognition

2024 Jefferson Fellowship
Finalist, 2023 John Burroughs Medal
Aldo and Estella Leopold Resident (2020)
Recipient, Aldo & Estella Leopold Writing Residency
Recipient, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Award
Recipient, New Mexico/New Visions Governor’s Award
Recipient, Canada Council for the Arts Grant
Recipient, Ontario Arts Council Literary Award
Recipient, Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences Fellowship
Board of Directors, Leopold Writing Program
Recipient, Playa Residency (2022)