Elena Marchetti

I write about the mushrooms that kill people. Someone has to. I'm a freelance journalist based in Brooklyn. Italian-American, grew up in a family where foraging was just what you did on weekends in the Catskills. My nonno could identify fifty species by smell alone. I mostly inherited his stubbornness.

I have a BA in Journalism from Columbia and spent years covering true crime and investigative health stories. I got into mushroom writing after covering the Erin Patterson case in Australia for an online publication in 2023. That story pulled me into forensic mycology, the science of how fungi kill, how poisonings are investigated, and why these cases are so hard to prosecute. I've been writing about the darker side of fungi ever since.