A fellow's forum with naturalist, filmmaker, and author, Priyanka Kumar from October 22, 2024.
About the Presentation
Writing in the signature format of her acclaimed Conversations with Birds, naturalist and filmmaker Priyanka Kumar blends stirring personal narratives with immersive journeys and robust natural history in her new book, THE LIGHT BETWEEN APPLE TREES (forthcoming from Island Press). A lyrical microhistory of apples, which are closely connected to the history of humankind, LIGHT recounts the joys of exploring an array of apples and orchards in gorgeously descriptive language that has been compared to that of Robin Wall Kimmerer, Rachel Carson, and Aldo Leopold. Over half of the sixteen thousand apple varieties once found in the U.S. have disappeared, along with their forest-like orchards, supplanted by monoculture, a profound cultural and ecological loss. The blighted fate of apples and trees mirrors our own natural illiteracy; we no longer read the land like a storybook and miss the essential wisdom the land once gave us. Painting a singular map of our apple past and future, of wild apple trees, old-growth forests, and diverse historic orchards, Kumar shines a light on how we can reenter forgotten landscapes, read the land, and restore our broken relationship with nature. Kumar takes readers on expeditions from her home in the American Southwest, to the Pacific Northwest and around the country, stretching the hearts and minds of readers toward deeper ways of engaging with nature and the land.
About Priyanka Kumar
PRIYANKA KUMAR is a nationally-acclaimed naturalist, filmmaker, 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). Conversations with Birds was a finalist for the 2023 John Burroughs Medal for distinguished natural history writing and the 2023 CLMP Firecracker Award for a book that makes a significant contribution to our literary culture. Her new nonfiction book, The Light Between Apple Trees is forthcoming in Sept 2025. Her feature documentary, The Song of the Little Road, is in the permanent collection of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.
Kumar’s essays and criticism appear in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Review of Books, High Country News, and Orion. Her work has been featured on CBS News Radio, Yale Climate Connections, Oprah Daily, NPR, and PBS. She is a recipient of a Playa Residency, an Aldo & Estella Leopold 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 holds an MFA from the University of Southern California and is an alumna of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.