maria pinto
Author, Naturalist, Educator, Consultant
Praise for Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless
A collection of essays about the search for mushrooms
FSD was awarded the Don Kissel Prize for Nonfiction!
FSD was shortlisted for the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature!
FSD is a Massachusetts Book Award honoree!
"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
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"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."
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"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."
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"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."
—Ross Gay,
author of The Book of (More) Delights
—Belle Boggs, author of The Gulf and The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood
—Gabriel Bump, author of The New Naturals
BIO
Photo by Billy Hickey
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.
Past
CONTACT
For inquiries about publication and rights, contact agent Zoe Howard
For Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless inquiries, contact publicist Sonya Bonczek
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