Award-winning author of CONVERSATIONS WITH BIRDS and THE LIGHT BETWEEN APPLE TREES. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, Orion, and Sierra. An internationally acclaimed naturalist and filmmaker, she has taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the University of Southern California. She serves on the Advisory Council of the Leopold Writing Program and teaches at the University of New Mexico. Her new book is THE GRASSLAND QUEEN (Princeton University Press; Nov 2026)
“[Priyanka Kumar’s] empathetic depictions and detailed fieldwork will stir readers to envision a more bird-friendly world.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Luminous. . . . Keenly observed and shimmering with detail, The Grassland Queen highlights the quiet beauty and profound significance of a bird—and an ecosystem—too often overlooked by humans.”
—Katie Noah Gibson, Shelf Awareness
“The Grassland Queen is a gorgeous love poem, a profound meditation, an odyssey as sweeping as the American Plains. I now love curlews with a passion that takes me aback and feel a new urgency to save their shimmering grassland homes. You will, too.”
—Sy Montgomery, author of The Soul of an Octopus
“What a joy it is to explore America’s prairies with Priyanka Kumar. The Grassland Queen is a beautiful hybrid: part field guide, part love song, and part call to action. Kumar’s devotion to the long-billed curlew and its habitats sings from every page of this fascinating journey.”
—Emily Nemens, author of Clutch
“I just love this book! It’s a great story, well told. I grew up with curlews — their voices haunt beautiful, lonely landscapes. And, as this book recounts, grasslands are landscapes on which human actions increasingly impinge.”
—Dr. Stuart L. Pimm, Doris Duke Professor of Conservation Ecology at Duke University, International Cosmos Prize winner, and President of Saving Nature
“This is nature writing at its best, robust biology enriched with history and personal experience. It is a must-read for anyone who cares about wildness, birds, environmental history, or our magnificent grasslands.”
—Joan Strassmann, Washington University in St. Louis and author of Slow Birding
“New Mexico has a habit of bringing out stellar writing on the natural world—Mary Austin, Aldo Leopold, Sharman Apt Russell, and now Priyanka Kumar with this delicious book on an elusive bird. Traveling across her home state and far beyond, Kumar parts the veil between humans and nature, stepping through graciously and smartly. What an intimate pleasure to be by her side.”
—Craig Childs, author of The Wild Dark
Newsletter: CONVERSATIONS with NATURE