Kiwi Smith

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A writer who happily dabbles in many genres, it was as a freshman at Occidental College that screenwriter Kirsten "Kiwi" Smith began pursuing her first love, poetry. At 19, she had her first poem published. Since then, she has had over 40 poems appear in literary magazines such as "The Gettysburg Review", "Witness", "The Massachusetts Review", and "Prairie Schooner." And now, she has her first book of poems being published by Little Brown -- a novel-in-verse called "The Geography of Girlhood."

Best known as the screenwriter of such comedies as Legally Blonde, 10 Things I Hate About You and Ella Enchanted, Kiwi has a new movie out: "She's the Man" starring the brilliant young comedienne Amanda Bynes.

Kiwi has been a writer-in-residence at The MacDowell Colony; attended the 1993 Breadloaf Writer's Conference on fellowship; and received numerous prizes, including "Nimrod's" Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. She has studied under writers as diverse as Amy Hempel, Robert Pinsky, Lucille Clifton and Marilynne Robinson.

Upon realizing she couldn't exactly make a living as a poet unless she was dead, Kiwi turned her attentions toward her other love: movies. She attended NYU's film program and upon graduataing from Occidental, she worked at CineTel Films, where she received her first screen credit on the sextravaganza Poison Ivy 2 , for a poem she contributed to the script. All that studying had finally paid off - Kiwi was having her literary work published in a straight-to-video movie!

It was at CineTel that Kiwi met her screenwriting partner, Karen. They began plotting their first script together the night they met (February 5, 1996, in case you're interested) on some margarita-soaked cocktail napkins. Since then, they have written 23 scripts together.