Priyanka Kumar is 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. Her debut novel, the critically acclaimed Take Wing and Fly Here, was published in 2013. She wrote, directed, and produced the feature documentary The Song of the Little Road starring Martin Scorsese and Peter Rainer, which is now in the permanent collection of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. Her essays and criticism have appeared or are forthcoming in publications including The Washington Post and The Huffington Post.
CONTRIBUTOR ARTICLES
In Search of Strong Women
Priyanka Kumar considers Manal al-Sharif's "Daring to Drive" and Omar Saif Ghobash's "Letters to a Young Muslim."...
What King Learned from Gandhi
Priyanka Kumar tells us what these two 20th-century luminaries shared....
Turn Left or Get Shot
Priyanka Kumar on Elizabeth Hinton's "From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime."...
Are We Done Punishing Black Men?
After Michelle Alexander’s measured assessment of mass incarceration in "The New Jim Crow," it is no longer possible to look the other way....
Chasing Particles Is Fun
"A Singularly Unfeminine Profession" is more a blueprint for a fabulous book than a fully realized one, but it sparks discussion....
Who’s That Man?
Wil Haygood gives a dramatic account of Thurgood Marshall's nomination to the Supreme Court in his book "Showdown."...
Murder, They Wrote
How can you get your head around 297 homicides in Los Angeles in 2011, with pitifully low clearance rates for black-on-black murders?...
Late Start, Spectacular Finish: The Life of Penelope Fitzgerald
For Fitzgerald, who grew up in a literary household and who was a brilliant student at Oxford, barge penury was not supposed to be in the cards....
All the Broken People
Bryan Stevenson wants more justice, more mercy, and more hope for all of them....
The Art of Cultivating Friends
Bob Ames was an American who understood Arab culture, who could befriend Arabs....
Life, Prison, and the Pursuit of Happiness
ALICE GOFFMAN’S On the Run couldn’t be more aptly titled. In the Philadelphia suburb that is the focus of ...
Here, Love Is Never Free: Priyanka Kumar on Cristina Henríquez’s “Book of Unknown Americans”
Henríquez introduces us to an assortment of migrants from Central and South America who find themselves in a rocky relationship with their new country....
Reading “Anna Karenina” in Beirut
Aaliya builds a life — and walls around herself — out of books in Rabih Alameddine’s An Unnecessary Woman....
