Elizabeth Acevedo Bestseller ‘With The Fire On High’ Lands At Picturestart With Movie In Works
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Picturestart has acquired rights to Elizabeth Acevedo’s New York Times bestselling novel With the Fire on High and will develop and produce a film that Acevedo is set to adapt.
Published in May by HarperCollins, the book tells the story of Emoni Santiago, a 17-year-old girl who must navigate the challenges of modern life in Philadelphia after becoming a single mother during her freshman year of high school. The one place she can let all that go is in the kitchen, where she adds a little something magical to everything she cooks, turning her food into straight-up goodness and pure joy for everyone in her life including her baby girl and her abuela. Even though she dreams of working as a chef after she graduates, Emoni knows it’s not worth her time to pursue the impossible. Yet, despite the rules she thinks she has to play by, once Emoni starts cooking, her only choice is to let her talent break free.
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Erik Feig and Lucy Kitada are producing for Picturestart.
Acevedo, a Dominican-American slam poet, this year became the first woman of color to win the Carnegie Medal children’s book award for her novel Poet X, which also won the 2018 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature among other prizes. She is repped by the Gotham Group’s Ellen Goldsmith-Vein and EMLA’s Ammi-Joan Paquette.
Ex-Lionsgate film boss Erik Feig launched Picturestart in May with backing from Warner Bros, Endeavor Content and Bron. It has been scooping up buzzy novels including recently Unpregnant and Eleanor & Park, and recently set Chadwick Boseman to star in Yasuke, about the first African samurai in Japan.
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