Priyanka Kumar's essays and criticism appear in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Huffington Post, the Santa Fe New Mexican, and High Country News. Her critically acclaimed debut novel, TAKE WING AND FLY HERE explores our changing relationship with the outdoors in the American West.
Kumar was awarded the Aldo & Estella Leopold Writing Residency in 2020. She is also a recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Award, New Mexico/New Visions Governor’s Award, Canada Council for the Arts Grant, Ontario Arts Council Literary Award, and an Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences Fellowship.
She received her M.F.A. from the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, and wrote, directed and produced the feature documentary THE SONG OF THE LITTLE ROAD, starring Martin Scorsese and Ravi Shankar. The film premiered at the Telluride Film Festival, was “Pick of the Week” in the Los Angeles Times, and is in the permanent collection of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.
An alumna of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Kumar has taught at the University of California Santa Cruz, the University of Southern California, and the Pima Writers’ Workshop. She spoke on “Ecological Fiction” at the AWP Conference in Washington, DC. She is a contributor to the anthology, FIRST AND WILDEST: THE GILA AT 100 and the NEW MEXICO POETRY ANTHOLOGY. Her new books, THE LIGHT BETWEEN APPLE TREES and CONVERSATIONS WITH BIRDS are forthcoming. She serves as a Board Director of the Leopold Writing Program.