Corinne Brinkerhoff

Corinne Brinkerhoff has earned writing credits on some of the most successful TV shows of the last several years. And she gives much of the credit for her own success to the education she received while attending public schools in Lawrence.

"The fact is that growing up in a place like Lawrence and going to great public schools had a really big hand in making this career a possibility," she said.

Brinkerhoff's early success doesn't surprise Joy Clumsky, a recently retired creative writing teacher who had Brinkerhoff in class at LHS. She recalls Brinkerhoff being one of her first published writers at the school.

She earned a bachelor's degree in linguistics at Truman State University in northeast Missouri. While at Truman, she started working for the TV station and caught the entertainment bug. She began considering how she could combine her two interests.

She went on to graduate school at Boston University, where she earned a master's degree in television. The friendships and connections she built there helped her land a job, first as an unpaid intern, at David E. Kelley's production company. She parlayed her internship into a permanent job that involved doing legal research for Kelley's scripts.

When he asked her to pitch some of her own ideas for the show, Brinkerhoff took the initiative to turn one of them into a spec script. A few days later, Kelley asked to read it.

Eventually, she worked her way up the ladder and became a full-time writer.

"It's really a dream job, and if you had told me when I was a second-grader at Schwegler School that this was going to be my life, I would not have believed it," Brinkerhoff said. "But I would have been psyched."

She was nominated for a Writers Guild of America Award for best new series in 201a.ill

She is an Emmy Award-nominated writer and producer. As part of David E.

Kelley's production team, she was a contributing writer and producer of the legal dramas "Boston Legal" and "The Good Wife", The Sherlock Holmes Crime

drama "Elementary" and, "Reckless."

In the Spring of 2014, she wrote and executive produced her own pilot for the CW called "Identity" and is currently working on a comedy called "Jane the Virgin", which premieres September of 2014.