Acquisition: David Ciminello’s The Queen of Steeplechase Park
Forest Avenue Press has acquired world English rights to David Ciminello’s debut novel, The Queen of Steeplechase Park, inspired by the life of his great aunt. Publication is slated for May 2024.
The Queen of Steeplechase Park is the absolutely, positively, practically, almost-true story of infamous burlesque queen and magic meatball maker Belladonna Marie Donato. Pregnant at fifteen after gleefully losing her virginity to pansexual neighborhood strongman Francis Anthony Mozzarelli, she is robbed of her baby by a pack of nefarious nuns and her embittered papa has her sterilized without her consent (legal in 1935). With the help of a besotted Francis and her top-secret meatball recipe, a devastated Bella embarks on a riotous quest through Depression-era Coney Island sideshows, the tawdry world of peek-a-boo striptease routines, a queer mob marriage, and a tasty collection of wisdom-filled recipes to find her lost child, herself, and maybe even true love. It all leads Bella back home, to the scene of her Original Sin, where she boldly faces matters of life and death, questions of forgiveness, and a holy mess only the healing properties of great Italian cooking can fix.
“The Queen of Steeplechase Park is an extravagantly rich historical novel, full of the sights, sounds, and intrigues of 1930s New York and New Jersey,” said Laura Stanfill, publisher of Forest Avenue. “Bella is a larger-than-life figure, soaring and stomping her way through a society intent on thwarting women’s independence. Her story will resonate with everyone who has ever struggled to stay true to themselves. We can’t wait to share David Ciminello’s masterpiece with readers.”
David Ciminello is a Lambda Literary Fellow and the proud recipient of a Table 4 Writers Foundation Grant. His fiction has appeared in the Lambda Award-winning anthology Portland Queer: Tales of the Rose City, Nailed Magazine, and in fine artist Stephen O’Donnell’s The Untold Gaze. His work has also been published in the literary journal Lumina and the online anthology Underwater New York. His stories have been featured on the podcast series Storytellers Telling Stories and Peace, Love & Soup, and on broadcastr. His poetry has appeared in Poetry Northwest. His original screenplay Bruno, an Academy Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting finalist, was made into a motion picture directed by Shirley MacLaine and starring Kathy Bates, Gary Sinise, and Jennifer Tilly. As a New York City teaching artist, David has taught poetry and has slam-coached multiple award winning Bronx students, grades 3-5. He holds a bachelor of fine arts degree in acting from The Catholic University of America and a master’s degree in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College. David and his husband, photographer and podcast artist Brian Delaney, currently reside in Portland, Oregon.
Forest Avenue Press was founded in 2012 in Portland, Oregon. Its titles are distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West.
David Ciminello
