Valerie Peterson

I tell stories — made up and true, dramatic and comedic, with words and pictures — sometimes all at once.

I'm a procedural junkie — and I prefer my dramas with emotional heft and a touch of humor. The pandemic also made me a true crime and podcast expert. In addition, I have a lot of directing and on-set experience — my goal is to get into a procedural drama writer's room and — eventually, once I gain more of the requisite knowledge — showrun one myself.

I was a finalist for the CBS TV Writers Mentoring Program, and a semi-finalist for the WGAE Made in NY Writers Room fellowship. During the pandemic I was honored and privileged to have been one of showrunner Glen Mazzara's the100 - a nearly year-long weekly group — during which he live-shared his deep, earned showrunner wisdom, resources and insights.

"Pretty Dead" — an award-winning short mockumentary I co-wrote about a corpse duty actress — was a selection of a dozen film festivals, including the HBO Women in Comedy Fest.

My individual procedural scripts have achieved honors at the Austin Film Festival Screenwriters Festival, the ScreenCraft TV Pilot Launch competition, and more. The Maid of Honor, a narrative comedic (and crime-y) short film I wrote and directed, was an Official Selection of the Sedona International Film Festival.

I've worked on numerous short film sets and was invited by one of the producers to be on both a sound stage and a location shoots for Law & Order: SVU.

My Jane Austen / time travel screenplay, The Jane Austen Syndrome, was awarded a table reading by The Drawing Board, a NYC script writers and actors lab. In 2023 it was chosen by an award-winning director and producer for possible Sundance Producer Lab development. In early 2024, the play was ra semi-finalist for the Stage 32 Grown Up Screenplay competition, and its past honors include those sponsored by the Austin Film Festival, Cinequest, and the Big Apple Film Festival.

I'm currently completing my first novel, which is very long and involves intertwining mysteries, book publishing, epistolary elements, and at least two dead bodies — and would make a GREAT TV series.

I'm the author of the “entertainingly irreverent”* Peterson’s Holiday Helper and Peterson’s Happy Hour humor/cocktail books (Random House/Clarkson Potter), and I'm the co-author (with Janice Fryer) of Cookie Craft (a backlist bestseller!) and Cookie Craft Christmas cookie decorating how-to books (Storey Publishing/Workman). I also occasionally write for publications such as the Washington Post and the New York Times.

My checkered past includes a number of years in the corporate book publishing world where, among many other duties, I produced videos, audiotapes, and commercials, and ran large departments of creatives, project-directed many moving parts and people, "took notes" from executives, and managed multi-million-dollar budgets — all of which gives me somewhat of a knowledge base to begin to understand the work of a showrunner.

I got my undergraduate English degree at Fordham University in the Bronx, and a certificate in Film & TV Directing from NYU-SPS. I currently live in and love NYC and have many West Coast family and friends. Importantly, I've stood with the WGA - literally, since (though "pre") I marched with them during the 2023 strike.