BIO

Gretchen Ratcliff Sawyer is a writer, screenwriter, literary visionary and winner of the 2018 Abraham Polonsky Prize in Writing at CSUN. In 2019, her critical essay on James Baldwin’s I Am Not Your Negro was published in the literary journal KAPU SENS, and her essay on Hollywood, Black Writers: Leveling the Playing Field was published in the literary journal CAPTURED. She is a proud alum of the Mike Curb College of Cinema, Television and Arts CTVA, at California State University, Northridge.

As a writer and screenwriter, Gretchen creates original works, adaptations, rewrites and editing, and provides outstanding script coverage. She writes comedy and drama for film, TV and web series. As a novelist, she writes compelling fiction and is working on her first romance novel entitled Look for Me in The Sunset. Gretchen states, “Writing is like a symphony. It has highs and lows that peak and drop down deep into the belly of our imaginations and emotional psychology.

A Los Angeles native, Gretchen has an accomplished dual and parallel career path in Project Management, and Business and Brand Development. Her career originated in product development in the ethnic health and beauty aids industry at WOC Products. She went on to join the award-winning Packaging Design, Product Development and Marketing Teams at Giorgio Beverly Hills and Gale Hayman Beverly Hills. She co-founded the aromatherapy products company MUSE, BODY, MIND & SPIRIT, an extraordinary wellness product line that landed in retailers like Nordstrom, Bloomingdale’s, Macy’s, Dillard’s. ZGallerie and TJMaxx, and in magazines like Elle, Essence and Glamour. Gretchen and partners appeared on the cover of Success Magazine as “Bootstrappers of the Year.” Simultaneously, Gretchen’s writing career was evolving on the corporate scene in marketing writing, technical writing, research papers, environmental impact reports, white papers, proposals in response to RFPs, RFIs and RFQs, product copywriting and promotional writing.

In 2016, Gretchen stepped fully into her purpose by taking her writing to the next level. She boldly downsized and left Corporate America to return to The Mike Curb School of Cinema at Cal State University, Northridge (CSUN) as a full-time student. Now that she has graduated, she is approaching the industry in a robust and diverse manner that demonstrates her ability as a wordsmith and creator of content for multiple platforms and audiences. She writes comedy for film and TV that features diverse and dynamic women heroines and super hero girls. She writes drama for film and television that tells compelling stories that focus on Shakespeare’s flawed human. Gretchen is currently shopping a comedy web series; an African American teen comedy-coming-of-age feature film and a riveting African American themed 1970s TV drama series.

Gretchen will continue to explore story-lines of friendship and betrayal, sickness and healing, sickness and death, rags-to-riches, riches-to-rags; comical self-reflection; trajectory climbs to power and devastating falls from grace, as these conditions make-up the synthesis of what it is to be human.