Bio
Jeff Gomez
Storyteller and Publisher of Kissena Park Press

Jeff Gomez’s life story reads not unlike the magical, mythological, hero-driven “worlds” he has created. Adored by teens and tweens everywhere, his best-known accomplishments include million-selling comic books and video games based on his the mythical Land of Corondor for the hugely popular Magic: The Gathering trading card game from Wizards of the Coast (a division of Hasbro), and an elaborate storyline based on his conception of the Lost Land of Galyanna for the $420 million Turok, Dinosaur Hunter video game franchise from Acclaim Entertainment.

But those feats of imagination were actually born when Gomez figured out, in the 2^nd grade, that he couldn’t draw his beloved dinosaurs in a lifelike manner. Instead, he sat down and started to write. Dinosaurs, after all, were big and powerful; they had a story and Gomez was determined to find it.

Half-Jewish, half-Puerto Rican, Gomez grew up in the Baruch Projects of Manhattan’s Lower East Side in a single-parent household. Having been taken from his 16-year-old mother at birth and placed with an Irish-American New Rochelle foster family—replete with a dog named Chipper—Gomez found himself on the gritty sidewalks of Houston Street and the East River Drive by age three, because his mother could not bear giving him up. Gomez’s world was turned upside down. As he says, “I instantly went from a diet of Gerber baby food to arroz con habichuelas y cerdo.”

He became terrified of cockroaches—the tough kids in his Loisaida neighborhood used them to torment the little kids—and taught himself to remain on constant lookout for people who might emotionally or physically assault him. His young mother would comfort him with fairy tales at night. In the hours before she got home from work, he would lose himself in monster movies that aired on afternoon television. Writing down wild stories of strange beasts loose on the streets of the city, and toying with plastic dinosaurs for hours on end in his bedroom, gave him a “bubble of serenity” in which he could fabricate “worlds” to make sense of it all. But darker, almost intrusive thoughts would plague him through his early years and into adolescence.

 When he was eleven, his mother finally proved to be her own hero and moved the family, which now included Gomez’s younger sister, Tami, to Flushing, Queens. Gomez found himself in yet another strange land.

One summer visiting his father in Puerto Rico, he had a revelation. His new stepmother’s sister, Lourdes, took a shine to Gomez’s spirited intellect and said to him, “I have to introduce you to hobbits.” After devouring J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Gomez knew what he wanted to do. “Everything came together—who I was, what I wanted to do, the life I wanted to lead,” he says.

He didn’t stop at Tolkien’s trilogy. He traced the author’s work to the sources, delving into ancient mythology and epic poetry, finally stumbling upon Joseph Campbell’s Mythology and his canon of work exploring the hero’s journey.

Gomez’s first “novel,” a 90-page epic dubbed The Core of Divinity, was completed by age 13. He wrote it in spiral notebooks while venturing through the forests and wetlands of Kissena Park in Queens. It was a place unlike any he had visited before, a hundred-acre wilderness in the heart of a still-harsh and threatening city. Although it remains unpublished, the story’s text would become both the mythological foundation for many of his future works, and its themes would become his personal code of honor.

He continued to refine his writing skills, and hold those dark thoughts at bay, by creating elaborate fantasy environments in the form of Dungeons & Dragons games. Desperate to keep his rough-edged teen friends interested in playing, he invented engaging storylines full of plot twists and confrontations.

At Queens College, City University of New York, he turned his attention to film and continued writing fiction and easily became the campus’s most popular “Dungeon Master.” Still grappling with the lurid and horrific images that would not be diagnosed as obsessive-compulsive disorder for many years, he recounted a fictionalized version of his struggle in a second novel, The Shadow Angel.

With his Bachelor of Arts degrees in film studies and communications in hand, Gomez went on to become a teacher in New York City’s public elementary schools. What he saw there led him to develop a curriculum, the Life Adventure System, to teach children creative writing and character values. His motto became “Never Surrender!”—a tribute and reminder of his conflicted childhood and the realization that no matter what, one can overcome the worst of circumstances.

Reading is key, Gomez feels. While he didn’t have a lot of mentors as a kid, the teachers and adults to whom he turned more often than not pointed him toward books. Besides Tolkien, he counts Stephen King, S.E. Hinton and Judy Blume among the most influential.

Compelled to share his philosophy and teaching techniques with a mass audience, Gomez left the school system and incorporated elements of his curriculum into a magazine. Put together on a Mac Plus computer and distributed in tandem with the late 1980s independent comic book boom, Gateways magazine would herald a time when stories would be told across multiple media, including video games and the Internet. As Publisher and columnist, Gomez’s skills and affability would finally come to the attention of the entertainment industry.

Gomez struck gold for Acclaim Entertainment. Drawing on both his life-long love of dinosaurs and his elaborate Dungeons & Dragons campaigns, his storylines for Turok and Magic: The Gathering licensed products would help them become blockbusters. Gomez was given his own imprint, Armada, where he honed his acquisitions and editing skills, publishing dozens of graphic novels, comic books and other licensed print products. But though he was experiencing the greatest success of his life, he was still tormented by frightening and endlessly repeating ruminations.

Gomez left Acclaim in 1997 in an effort to exorcise his demons once and for all. He did so in the form of a film he wrote and directed called Red Light August. Based on his unpublished novel, The Shadow Angel, the film is story of Boothe, an artist, whose budding friendship with a homeless teen poet is jeopardized by Boothe’s bizarre obsessions and secret rituals. Red Light August premiered in Park City, Utah during the Sundance Film Festival, was picked up for airing on PBS stations across the country and brought Gomez to the attention of Hollywood. Best of all, the process of making the film would finally bring Gomez to terms with his OCD, and his disorder has since been successfully treated.

In 2000 he took the leap and founded Starlight Runner Entertainment with a good friend, Mark S. Pensavalle, from his old neighborhood in Queens, to develop entertainment franchises. With clients ranging from Mattel to Scholastic to the Walt Disney Company, Starlight Runner was a hit, and Gomez began thinking of returning to the medium that was his first love.

Thus Kissena Park Press was born, a natural evolution, Gomez feels, of his years as a storyteller, editor and publisher. “The move to publishing adult trade books is, in many ways, exactly where my life has been leading all these years. The greatest properties, the most successful works in our culture, are derived from books. Starlight Runner has taken huge brands and made them better. Now, Kissena Park Press is going to introduce the world to new ways for us to learn how to rise above our circumstances, no matter how tough, no matter how dark it gets. So much of storytelling is listening—to your heart, to what the characters are telling you, to what the story wants next. My heart has been telling me for a while now that Kissena Park Press comes next in this journey.”

Bio
Mark S. Pensavalle
Vice President of Production & Operations

As the only child of a Sicilian immigrant father and Queens-born mother, Mark S. Pensavalle had the values of hard work and success drilled into him from the very start. A streetwise kid who liked to play baseball (his favorite team remains the Yankees) and hang out with his buddies, he had his eyes opened to the power of imagination when at age 12 a new kid moved to the neighborhood. Pensavalle and Jeff Gomez became lifelong friends when, Pensavalle says, “Jeff dragged me into Kissena Park and talked me in to playing Dungeons and Dragons.” The allure of the game, for Pensavalle, was in creating a larger-than-life image of himself that he could project into a world that was completely unlike the one in which he lived.

Imagination had not been considered a priority by Mark’s strict Italian father, and risk-taking even less so. “Flying planes is for other people, you need to think about the future,” Mark recalls his father saying. “In other words, don’t dream about what is out of reach. You work hard and get a job, that’s how you survived.”

Yet traversing the forests and wetlands of Kissena Park with Gomez, imagining fire-breathing monsters and engaging in spectacular duels compelled the usually pragmatic Pensavalle. He says, “I’d been playing in that park since I was in diapers, but Jeff made me look at it in a different way. It was the first time I really thought outside myself. Those adventures made me want to go places and do things that most guys from Flushing would have just laughed at.”

This early experience, Pensavalle believes, allowed him to become much more adventurous later in life. He has tried bungee jumping and stunt flying and traveled the world. Now, he says, “I want to ride on the space shuttle…when the price comes down!”

Gomez says about that time, “Mark was a tough guy and I was the new kid in the neighborhood. He hated it when my schoolmates made fun of me, and he let them have it if he caught them. I was the dreamer, and he was always the pragmatist, down-to-earth, telling me how to convert my dreams into strategies.”

Following his father’s advice, Pensavalle earned his Bachelor’s of Arts degree in business management at Baruch College, City University of New York, and headed into the publishing industry in 1987, beginning as a production assistant at the tax publisher Matthew Bender. An avid music fan, Pensavalle also managed bands on the side for several years. Unfortunately, he says, “Nobody in New York wanted to hear Seattle sound at the time.”

At Matthew Bender he heeded the advice of his supervisor, who recognized Pensavalle’s creative energy and ambition. He says, “She told me, ‘Go somewhere that will nurture your creative side.’” Thus he found himself a position as production manager at Harper Collins, where he worked on high-profile projects such as the “secret” Under Fire by Oliver North. Later, at Random House, he worked directly with Dell/Delacorte publisher Carole Baron on several prestigious projects, including Hannibal by Thomas Harris, and with Susan Kamil at Dial Press on the widely regarded Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp.

Working in adult trade publishing changed his relationship to books and reading. “It gave me the opportunity to read widely and quickly. I loved music, I loved stories, but now I could pick up any book being published, or trade comp copies with my friends at other houses, and read anything,” he says, still clearly astonished at this perquisite of the industry. He still reads widely, lately delving into Clive Barker’s Imajica, Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series and The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason.

Pensavalle and Gomez stayed in touch over the years, and in 2000, Gomez invited him to start up a new venture, Starlight Runner Entertainment, Inc. It was ideal timing for Pensavalle, who was ready to expand his horizons in production to other media such as film, Web sites and licensed products. Gomez says, “For Starlight Runner, I needed someone who understood what I was about, but who wasn’t like me. Mark’s get-it-done attitude was a perfect complement to my creative frenzy. As usual, Mark is the strategist.”

Pensavalle loved the new challenges at Starlight Runner. The highlight of his collaboration with Gomez on Starlight Runner was his key role in pitching and implementing the production of Starlight Runner’s Hot Wheels Highway 35 cross-media campaign for Mattel, Inc. To bring the first wave of these products to market in less than six months’ time, he supervised production of three property bibles, thirty-five comic books, a special promotion for Target department stores, convention displays and an animated teaser.

With Kissena Park Press, Pensavalle is excited about the prospect of returning to producing beautiful books for a house that does things the old-fashioned way. “The great tradition in book publishing, from a production point of view, is the individualized selection of paper and fonts and binding based on the content of the story,” he says. “When I’m in a bookstore and see cookie-cutter production values screaming from every shelf, I’m even more inspired to return to all that was best in the tradition of the industry. Yes, I’m pragmatic, but I also believe you can bring creativity and passion to the making of books.”

As for reading, Pensavalle says, “Good books allow you to change the way you look at things, and that’s the magic, that’s how books transform lives. That’s our ambition with Kissena Park Press, to publish books that take you back to that moment in time when you saw the world outside of yourself.”