The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2022 Winter Literature Grant to C. Quintana for her upcoming novel The Twisted Fate of La Media Luna.

C. Quintana, or CQ (she/any) is a queer multi-genre writer with Cuban and Louisiana roots based on unceded Canarsee and Munsee Lenape land in Cypress Hills, Brooklyn. This past fall, CRAFT First Chapters Competition selected an opening excerpt of The Twisted Fate of La Media Luna as a finalist, and prior, CQ worked on the manuscript in Megan Giddings’ 2021 Tin House Novel Writing workshop.

Years ago, CQ attended a downtown production of Eurydice by Sarah Ruhl, which recast the role of Hades as a woman. CQ left thinking: why couldn’t that role have been written as a woman in the first place? Why do we assume Hades is a man? Haven’t we seen enough men in these parts? She felt similarly when she finally picked up Neil Gaiman’s much beloved novel – and a comparison title for her own – American Gods. Albeit a gripping book, CQ wondered: where are all the women—let alone other genders?

In the upcoming novel, a queer Latine American Gods by Neil Gaiman meets Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James, The Twisted Fate of La Media Luna is an evocative literary novel following Evangeline Odio, a native islander from La Media Luna who spurns the goddess Doña and thus upsets the utopia that marks her entire island’s history. Fusing Yoruban and Taíno lore, the novel explores the multitudes of queer women and nonbinary figures of color, as well as a new mythology in a contemporary world not unlike our own.

In the novel’s invented mythos, the story melds the complex worlds and cultural roots of New Orleans, Louisiana – the town where CQ grew up and into herself – with Santiago de Cuba, Cuba – where her mother’s side of the family is from; known as the cultural heart of the island – in her creation of the invented island of La Media Luna.

Most recently, Tanya Saracho’s Ojalá Ignition Lab selected CQ as a finalist for its inaugural pilot development program. Her dramedy pilot Career Gay was featured on the inaugural Out in Hollywood “Out Loud” List, her dystopian drama pilot Invisible Lily was featured on the WeForShe Ones to Watch List, and she served as Staff Writer on ABC's The Baker and the Beauty. With plays and musicals produced across the country, CQ is the author of the full-length play Scissoring (Dramatists Play Service) and The Heart Wants, a chapbook of poetry (Finishing Line Press). The recipient of residencies and fellowships from Paragraph (Finalist Jane Hoppen Residency), MacDowell (Ernest & Red Heller Fellow), Van Lier New Voices at the Lark, Queer/Art, and Lambda Literary, their poetry, lyric essay, and fiction is published or forthcoming in Third Coast, Foglifter, BOMB Magazine, Latino Book Review, great weather for MEDIA, OnCuba, and beyond.

CQ is currently staffed on a new television series to be announced, developing a project with Baobab Studios in collaboration with 3dar, an Audible Emerging Playwrights Fund commission, and a musical adaptation of Elizabeth Acevedo's Beastgirl & Other Origin Myths with composer Janelle Lawrence premiering at the Kennedy Center Theater for Young Audiences April 2022. CQ is co-curator of the all-queer, all genre reading series Bespoke, based out of the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division and virtually during the pandemic era, and is co-chair of the Writers Guild of America East LGBT+ Salon. She holds an MFA in Playwriting from Columbia University.

For more information on CQ please visit her Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and website.