Author Priyanka Kumar to discuss collection of essays at Bookworks on Aug. 30

BOOKWORKS

Priyanka Kumar discusses and autographs her book of essays “Conversations with Birds” at 6 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 30, at Bookworks, 4022 Rio Grande Blvd. NW.

The author grew up in northern India and moved to North America as a teenager. In her twenties, while living in Los Angeles and working on films, Kumar began to rediscover her place in the landscape — and in the cosmos — by watching and studying birds.

Among the birds she has observed have been sandhill cranes at the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge near Socorro, a white-breasted nuthatch that visits the apricot tree behind Kumar’s family’s casita in Santa Fe, snowy plovers building nests with bits of shell and grass, and a mango-colored Western tanager that rescued the author from a bout of altitude sickness at Sequoia National Park.

The essay collection was a finalist for the 2023 Firecracker Award in Creative Nonfiction, given by the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses for independently published literature.

Kumar is also a filmmaker and a novelist.

UNM PRESS

The University of New Mexico Press has just published the 50th anniversary edition of “The Great Taos Bank Robbery and Other True Stories” by Tony Hillerman. The anniversary edition, like the 1973 edition, contains Hillerman’s short, and shorter, explorations of life in New Mexico.

The anniversary edition has a new foreword by James McGrath Morris and a new introduction by Hillerman’s daughter, Anne Hillerman.

As Morris writes, “The nonfiction stories Hillerman wrote were a testing ground for writing techniques he would return to time and time again as a mystery author.”

Tony Hillerman, who died in 2008, is most remembered for his bestselling series of 18 mystery novels mainly set on the Navajo reservation. The first in that series was “The Blessing Way,” published in 1970.

He was the subject of a well-received, incisive biography by Morris, a Santa Fe resident.

Anne Hillerman, herself a respected author of mysteries, writes in her introduction that the stories in the “The Great Train Robbery” reflect her father’s training as a journalist. “Besides what it shows readers about the New Mexico Tony Hillerman loved, the collection offers insight into the author’s tenacity for tracking down a curious fact or an odd detail to make a tale lively and intriguing.”

Among the other stories in the collection are “How Quemado Got Quemado,” “Las Trampas,” “Othello in Union County” and “Quijote in Rio Arriba County.”

The University of New Mexico Press also published the original 1973 edition of the collection.

— Compiled by David Steinberg/For the Journal