Maria Pinto, "Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless" (w/Almah LaVon)
About this Event
We are thrilled to welcome long-time friend of White Whale, Zinzi Clemmons, back to Pittsburgh to celebrate her debut collection of essays: Freedom. Zinzi will be joined in coversation by local artist, cultural worker, and librarian, Bekezela Mguni.
“Incredibly perceptive. . . . A stunning testimony from a talented writer who strips off false facades with honesty and vulnerability, and leaves us with a searing question: ‘Can you build a nation based on love?’” —mónica teresa ortiz, BookPage (starred review)
We are excited to collaborate with to host author and mycophile, Maria Pinto at White Whale for a lively reading and conversation about her award-winning book, Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival. This is a collaborative event with the support of Black Unicorn Library, Cutting Root Farm, and Write Pittsburgh, hosted by local artist, librarian, and educator, Bekezela Mguni. Maria Pinto will be joined in conversation by local writer and fairy marsh monster, Almah LaVon.
Naturalist, forager, and educator Maria Pinto offers a stunning debut book that uncovers strange and beautiful fungal connections between the natural and human worlds. She mingles reportage, research, memoir, and nature writing, touching on topics that range from Black farmers’ domestication of the unforgettable aroma of truffles to the possibility that enslaved people wielded mycological poisons against their enslavers. Pinto brings a new perspective and a distinctive literary voice to this mix of environmental and lived history, and every page sings with her enthusiasm for the networks in which we are embedded: fungal, ecological, ancestral, and communal. Join her in pursuit of beautiful, perplexing, delicious, and deadly mushrooms as she explores this understudied kingdom’s awe-inspiring diversity and discovers how fungi have been used by people, especially those on the margins, for survival, pleasure, revelation, and revolution.
Praise for Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless
"Reading Maria Pinto's Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless, I am stopped in my tracks again and again—admiring a string of lusciously juxtaposed words, laughing out loud at a slice of irony, thrilling at the syntax, the sentences—as her language carries, and often almost sings, the beauty and mystery and puzzlement and danger and invention and entanglement and fecundity and wonder of the mycological. And the mycophilic. I have rarely encountered such beautiful writing. I have rarely encountered such a beautiful book."—Ross Gay, author of The Book of (More) Delights
“The most daring and poignant book about fungi I've ever read. Fascinating and gorgeously written, while also being darkly funny—Pinto's prose is powerfully personal and vivid. Reading it made me ache to get up and wander into the woods." - —Belle Boggs, author of The Gulf and The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood
"Pinto has executed a singular work of Black naturalism. She's charting a different, and much-needed, path for nature writing where there is radicalism, self-love, lineage, and community in nature. The woods, she tells us, should belong to everybody. I wish I'd had this text when I was young, unmoved by other naturalists. I am glad to have it now." —Gabriel Bump, author of The New Naturals
"This delectably provocative fungal sampling gives the reader much to savor."-- Kirkus (starred review)
"Pinto writes with an urgency and a presence; a zest comes through on every page, in each paragraph. What a pleasure her prose!"-- Nina MacLaughlin, author of Winter Solstice: An Essay
"a joyful mix of memoir, science, history, and adventure...with echoes of Jamaica Kincaid and Annie Dillard."--Publisher's Weekly
BEKEZELA MGUNI is a queer Trinidadian artist, cultural worker, and librarian. She serves as the Artistic Director of Dreams of Hope, which provides the region’s LGBTQIA+ youth with a welcoming environment to grow in confidence, express themselves, and develop as leaders through the arts. She is a steward of the PGH Flower Library and the founder of The Black Unicorn Library and Archive Project, a community initiative cultivating libraries as sites of possibility and freedom.
ALMAH LAVON (theyy/themme) is an AfroPrismatic creature of myth rumored to wander among the squonk haunting the Allegheny National Forest. Their writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Autostraddle, Feminist Wire, and The Black Femme Collective, with their biomythographical work surfacing in the Lambda Literary Award-winning anthology, does your mama know? (revised edition). Their creative nonfiction has been published in Queer Magic: Power Beyond Boundaries and Black Quantum Futurism Vol. 1 as well as many other anthologies and publications. Their fiction can be found in Black from the Future: A Collection of Black Speculative Writing; Unfettered Hexes: Queer Tales of Insatiable Darkness; the Berlin-based DADDY Magazine; and Harvard Divinity School's Peripheries Journal, among others.
When she's not in the woods (and sometimes when she is), MARIA PINTO is a writer, editor, and educator. She teaches writing for various literary organizations. She reads fiction for Peripheries Journal and serves on the board of Hale, an outdoor education and land conservancy nonprofit. Her writing has been supported by Assets for Artists at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Oak Spring Garden Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, the Mass Cultural Council, the Writers’ Room of Boston, The Mastheads, and The Garrett on the Green. Her fiction has appeared in Obsidian, Frigg, and Necessary Fiction, among publications, and her nonfiction can be found in Science, Orion Magazine, LitHub, Longreads, Arnoldia, and Mushroom People. Maria has spoken about foraging, food autonomy, and fungal poetry, among other topics via Bust Magazine, NPR stations WGBH, WBUR, and WAMC, PBS’s Poetry in America, the website Public Lands, and podcasts including unladylike. She has led workshops and given lectures for the North American Mycological Association, Northeast Mycological Federation, New York Mycological Society, Central Texas Mycological Society, Sonoma County Mycological Association, Wisconsin Mycological Society, Telluride Mushroom Festival, Boston Center for the Arts, and Print Ain’t Dead, which published her zine for beginning mushroom hunters. She leads regular mycological forays at Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum.
About the Community Partners:
was founded in 2014 and has been unfolding ever since. The library has existed in many forms from pop-ups in storefronts, installations at universities and art galleries to tables at farmers markets, and the PGH International airport. We also operated a brick-and-mortar Reading Room from 2017-2019 in the hilltop neighborhood of Allentown. We continue to share a love of reading with our community through virtual programming and special events throughout the year and most recently held hosting satellite locations in 2022 at at BOOM Concepts and Alternate Histories Studios.
was founded in 2014 to build connection for people and plants. We love connecting with people and building community through plants, hosting gatherings, decorating events with flowers, connecting with earth and people. We love supporting community organizations and activists with self care items, flowers, tea blends and a quiet place to gather. We urge you to be in touch if you are doing community work and want to collaborate with our farm.
is a literary arts organization that uses writing as a tool for transformation, liberation, and community connection. We provide accessible writing workshops, publications, and partnerships that center people whose voices have been historically marginalized or excluded from traditional literary spaces. Founded as Girls Write in 2016, our work now spans community-based programs, public workshops for adults, and organizational partnerships, emphasizing our belief that writing is not just for academics or professional writers. It’s for anyone seeking expression, transformation, liberation, connection, and more.
Where is it happening?
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