Candace Kearns Read

Candace grew up in LA with a passion for writing and attained her BFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. She has worked as a story analyst and script doctor since the early 1990s, when she got her start in talent agencies such as the William Morris Agency and later, International Creative Management. Over the years, she has assisted many A-List actors and producers with script development and has personally advised the likes of Anthony Hopkins, Marlon Brando, Michelle Pfeiffer and Denzel Washington, along with many others.

She has written over a dozen screenplays professionally for independent producers, including screenplays based on true stories for Ray Liotta’s company Turquoise Blue and the legendary Denver crime family The Smaldones. Her screenplays have been optioned and placed in development at HBO, Disney and Fox, and her original screenplay The Day She Drove Me was optioned by Junction Films, with Lauren Holly attached to direct and Andrjez Sekula (Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, American Psycho) attached as cinematographer. Most recently, her TV Pilot Bottom of the Ninth was a Semi-Finalist in the 2022 Page Awards.

As an educator, she served as a full-time professor of screenwriting at Metropolitan State University of Denver and is currently a teaching artist for Denver Center for Performing Arts and a screenwriting instructor for Lighthouse Writers Workshop.

She is the author of Shaping True Story into Screenplay (2011, CreateSpace), The Rope Swing: A Memoir, (2016, Eagle Wings Press) and co-author of Bogie’s Bike (2015, Lolo Barker Press, with an introduction by Anthony Hopkins.)