• Galleys are available upon request.
• Pursuing the ABA IndieNext campaign for September 2021.
• Steven Reigns successfully presented his book to the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Assn (PNBA) and the California Independent Booksellers Assn (CALIBA) in April 2021.
• A Quilt for David is the Lambda Literary Book Club pick for September 2021.
• We’ll create a special campaign around World AIDS Day, Dec 1, 2021.
• The national media campaign will focus on outlets covering literature and poetry, LGBTQ+, memoir, and true crime. This includes the pursuit of reviews, excerpts, interviews, profiles, and more.
• Profile forthcoming in The Gay and Lesbian Review, September 2021
• Our social media campaign involves the author's Instagram account, plus amplification on City Lights's own popular Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts.
• We’ll pursue radio programs and podcasts like "This American Life" and others that focus on "true life" stories.
• Excited to partner with Lambda Literary, LGBTQ+, and AIDS organizations around the country for events, writing workshops, and more. Steven Reigns has experience teaching writing to all ages, from teens to seniors.
• Reigns is available for events, in person and virtual, nationwide. Travel cities include: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, St Louis (author was born here), Santa Fe, Atlanta, Miami and Tampa (city where story took place), and elsewhere.
• We’ll seek library placement with collections strong in LGBTQ+
• Blurbs: High profile endorsements received from Brontez Purnell (100 Boyfriends), Natalie Goldberg (Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within), Justin Torres (We the Animals), and Sarah Schulman (Let the Record Show: A Political History of Act Up New York 1987-1993), among others. Forthcoming from Richard Blanco.

The hidden history of a vulnerable gay man whose life and death were turned into tabloid fodder.

In the early 1990s, eight people living in a small conservative Florida town alleged that Dr. David Acer, their dentist, infected them with HIV. David's gayness, along with his sickly appearance from his own AIDS-related illness, made him the perfect scapegoat and victim of mob mentality. In these early years of the AIDS epidemic, when transmission was little understood, and homophobia rampant, people like David were villainized. Accuser Kimberly Bergalis landed a People magazine cover story, while others went on talk shows and made front page news.

With a poet's eulogistic and psychological intensity, Steven Reigns recovers the life and death of this man who also stands in for so many lives destroyed not only by HIV, but a diseased society that used stigma against the most vulnerable. It's impossible not to make connections between this story and how the twenty-first century pandemic has also been defined by medical misinformation and cultural bias.

Inspired by years of investigative research into the lives of David and those who denounced him, Reigns has stitched together a hauntingly poetic narrative that retraces an American history, questioning the fervor of his accusers, and recuperating a gay life previously shrouded in secrecy and shame.

"Much too long, suffering has been part of our collective queer legacy. We weather the storm of insult to character and seemingly irreconcilable injustice in tandem with the hope that the arc of time will bend towards justice; our time is now. A Quilt for David is a posthumous journal of vindication."—Brontez Purnell, author of 100 Boyfriends

"A stunning homage to people with AIDS."—Sarah Schulman, author of Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993

"I found this an incredibly moving book. Reigns deals in hard truths, revisioning one man's life and death, and our collective queer history."—Justin Torres, author of We the Animals

"A Quilt for David is amazing and so powerful, filled with anger and frustration . . . It's an unforgettable book."—Marie Cloutier, Greenlight Bookstore, Brooklyn, NY

"Told in short, occasionally haiku-like entries, Reigns has done what literature should: put the reader into the mind, the suffering, of another human being."—Andrew Holleran, author of Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited

"Steven Reigns lifts David Acer thirty years after his death to show the naked cost of violent, unexamined public opinion around the catastrophe of AIDS. This poetry masterfully documents the tangle of hatred and lies haunting a generation of survivors. I am often grateful for what poems give to me, most especially the ones in this book."—CAConrad, author of AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration

"This writing is energetic, alive, and uncensored. Through poetry and prose we glean a deep understanding of a life misunderstood and mischaracterized. Reigns goes to the mat to find out what really happened, and with his expert pacing we're right there with him."—Natalie Goldberg, author of Writing Down the Bones

"One of the most important roles a poet can assume is that of emotional historian. Reigns certainly understands that notion in this necessary and genre-bending book."—Richard Blanco, 2013 Presidential Inaugural Poet, author of How to Love a Country