Marveling at Mushrooms: English Collaboration Showcases Fungi-themed Books, Talks, Arts and Crafts for All Ages

The event at Hyattsville Library took advantage of mushroom pop culture moment to engage community members.

By Chloe Kim

Mushrooms and literature may seem an odd pair, but at “Mushroom Marvels: Craft and Conversation,” a recent Hyattsville library event, Prince George’s County residents explored everything fungi through books, arts and crafts, and a literary talk thanks to a collaboration with English faculty, students and recent graduates at the University of Maryland.

“Mushroom Marvels” was co-hosted by Hyattsville librarians and UMD alums Maria Vivar-Guzman ’17, English, and Hannah Erickson ’06, classics. Inspired by the growing prominence of mushrooms and fungi in popular culture, Vivar-Guzman and Erickson wanted to capitalize on the trend to create public programming that would appeal to both adults and children in Prince George’s County. They worked with Associate Professor Christina Walter, doctoral students Diana Proenza and Himadri Agarwal, and recent graduates Jenny Schollaert Ph.D. ’23 and Brittany Starr Ph.D. ’23 to organize the event, which featured book recommendations, arts and crafts stations, a scavenger hunt and a short talk, all related to mushrooms.

Highlights included mushroom paper, which Walter and Proenza created by pressing a mixture of blended fresh mushrooms and paper pulp, and letterpress prints of Emily Dickinson’s poem “The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants,” which brought BookLab equipment to the library. The talk, given by Schollaert and Starr, covered topics from activism and social justice to pop culture and literature. The aim was to introduce humanities topics to the public in a fun, approachable way.

“People can understandably be put off by some of the more complex ideas that exist in the academic humanities,” Proenza said. “We’re inviting the public to think about them in a slightly different way, and hopefully making them more digestible.”

The Oct. 7 event was a continuation of several recent collaborations between the Prince George’s County Memorial Library System and the UMD Department of English, facilitated by Vivar-Guzman and her former English professor Tita Chico. Previous collaborations included a series of book arts workshops for Hyattsville teens and a bilingual storytime event featuring children’s stories in Spanish from Central America, both projects funded by the Center for Literary and Comparative Studies (CLCS) Awards in the Public Humanities.

According to Walter, the ongoing collaborations between the department and the library create an important bridge between the university and surrounding communities.

“As a flagship institution at a land grant university, we are not just serving the students who happen to be in our classrooms,” Walter said.