Book Talk with Maria Pinto: Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless
Join us for a discussion with naturalist and educator Maria Pinto about her beautiful new book, Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival . Maria will be in conversation with Professor Rod Ferguson.
More about the book:
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.
More about Maria:
When she’s not in the woods (and sometimes when she is), Maria Pinto is a writer, editor, and educator. She teaches writing and consults for the literary arts nonprofit GrubStreet, where she was a Community Programs Teaching Fellow from 2021-2023. She reads fiction for Peripheries Journal and serves on the board of Hale, an outdoor education and land conservancy nonprofit. 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 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.
More about Rod:
Roderick A. Ferguson is professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies & Black Studies. He is the author of One-Dimensional Queer(Polity, 2019), We Demand: The University and Student Protests (University of California, 2017), The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference(University of Minnesota, 2012), and Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique(University of Minnesota, 2004). He is the co-editor with Grace Hong of the anthology Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization(Duke University, 2011). He is also co-editor with Erica Edwards and Jeffrey Ogbar of Keywords of African American Studies(NYU, 2018). He is currently working on two monographs—The Arts of Black Studies and The Bookshop of Black Queer Diaspora.
Ferguson’s teaching interests include the politics of culture, women of color feminism, the study of race, critical university studies, queer social movements, and social theory.