To my dear subscribers—
I am writing with a quick update concerning two upcoming events where I will be speaking:
Date + Time: Wednesday, October 22, 2025, 4 - 5:30pm
Location: Harvard Medical School, Gordon Hall, Waterhouse Room, 25 Shattuck Street, Boston, MA 02115
This upcoming “Harvard Medical School and Legacies of Slavery and Racism” presentation will share findings from an ongoing research project that I joined at Harvard Medical School for a year of active research beginning in 2023. This research project is part of the larger Harvard & Legacy of Slavery Initiative—a university-wide effort launched in 2019 to take accountability for its involvement in and benefit from slavery, including actively advancing reparative efforts that meaningfully impact the direct descendants of the enslaved and descendant communities.
CORRECTION: This event is only open to Harvard ID-holders and will not be streamed over the internet. Learn more and register here.
Date + Time: Friday, November 7, 2025, 6 - 8:30pm
Location: Unnameable Books, 66 Avenue A, Turners Falls, Massachusetts 01376
I am honored to share that I will be in conversation with my friend Maria Pinto about her forthcoming book Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombie, and Black Survival on the evening of Friday, November 7th. This is the book’s description:
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.
For a taste of Maria’s writerly brilliance, check out this essay she published in Orion. The book drops on October 28, 2025 and you can preorder it here. If you’re too far away to join us in Western Mass, check out her growing list of book tour stops, including various points in the New York metro area, Hudson Valley, Los Angeles, and Cincinnati!
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