07/07/2026
📚 🍄 🌈 ☀️ This July we are so grateful for the mycelial connections that bring us together! Celebrating an abundance of incredible literary offerings that grow beyond the page. We are excited to welcome author, educator, and mycophile, Maria Pinto maria pinto to Pittsburgh to share from her powerful new book, Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies and Black Survival on Thursday, July 16th at 7pm at White Whale Bookstore. She will be joined in conversation by local writer and illustrious fairy marsh monster Almah LaVon! 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.
White Whale Bookstore and the Flower Farm Residency are grateful to present this collaborative event with the support of Black Unicorn Library Project, Cutting Root, Dreams Of Hope | Q***r Youth Arts, Write Pittsburgh, Ujamaa Collective (oo-JAH-mah), and Sibyls Shrine. The reading & conversation is hosted by local artist, librarian, and educator, Bekezela Mguni.
