Kumar, Priyanka

Priyanka Kumar’s essays and criticism appear in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Review of Books, on HuffPost, and other publications. Kumar also wrote, directed, and produced the feature documentary The Song of the Little Road, starring Martin Scorsese and Ravi Shankar. She opens Conversations with Birds (Milkweed Editions) with a simple but defining declaration: “Birds are my almanac. They tune me into the seasons, and into myself.” Growing up in northern India, Kumar took her immersion in nature for granted. But after moving to North America as a teenager, she became increasingly distanced from the natural world. But in her twenties, while living in Los Angeles and working on films, she began to rediscover her place in the landscape by watching birds. Tracing her movements across the American West, this collection of essays brings the avian world to life. She is not just a list keeper, counting and cataloging species – she writes about the mango-colored western tanager that rescues her from a bout of altitude sickness and the ancient sandhill cranes in the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, and in her stories, they “become a portal to a more vivid, enchanted world.”