We are excited to collaborate with The Black Unicorn Library and Archive Project 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. 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.

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 other 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.