Conversations with Birds is a 2023 CLMP Firecracker Award Finalist. Priyanka Kumar is the award-winning author of Conversations with Birds, widely acclaimed as “a landmark book” that “could help people around the world rewild their hearts and souls….” (Psychology Today). Her essays and criticism appear in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Orion, and High Country News. She has been featured on CBS News Radio and Oprah Daily, and honored with an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Award, a New Mexico/New Visions Governor’s Award, a Canada Council for the Arts Grant, and an Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences Fellowship. 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.