Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: An Evening with Maria Pinto & Ross Gay

A beautiful examination of nature and human connection

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.

6 pm reception/6:30 pm program
Free & open to the public. Registration required.

Copies of Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless will be available for sale & signing.

About Maria Pinto

Maria Pinto spent her feral childhood in the Jamaican hills and grassy waters of South Florida. She lives in the Boston area now, where she teaches for the literary arts nonprofit GrubStreet, serves on the board of Hale, an outdoor education and land conservancy organization, and leads mushroom walks independently and at the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University. Her words have appeared or will appear in Orion,Longreads, Necessary Fiction, Peripheries, and Arnoldia. Her book of lyric essays inspired by mushrooms is called Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me About Nourishment, Ecology, Poisons, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival.

About Ross Gay

Ross Gay is interested in joy.

Ross Gay wants to understand joy.

Ross Gay is curious about joy.

Ross Gay studies joy.

Something like that.

~

Ross Gay is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding, winner of the PEN American Literary Jean Stein Award; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. In addition to his poetry, Ross has released three collections of essays—The Book of Delights was released in 2019 and was a New York Times bestseller; Inciting Joy was released in 2022, and his newest collection, The Book of (More) Delights was released in September of 2023.