CARLETON EASTLAKE began his careers in both creative writing and public policy while in college at UCLA when he served as a staff writer for a California Assemblyman’s campaign.

He went on to take a degree at the Harvard Law School with a concentration in law and the social sciences, which gave him a graduate education in abnormal psychology as it relates to criminal law – much of it taught by the famed criminal defense attorney Alan Dershowitz and the psychiatrist who literally wrote the book, Alan Stone. His graduate thesis was on the comparative anthropology of homicide in three preindustrial cultures.

His writing career took an even more serious turn when he spent a summer working as an intern at NASA, where he edited a study on the Human Factor in Long Duration Manned Space Flight and contributed an article on Survival Homicide – what to do if the Manned Mars Mission encountered a calamity which left the astronauts with the resources to return only a portion of the crew to Earth.

After graduating law school cum laude, he became a Confidential Attorney-Adviser to a Commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission and then spent a year in private practice as an antitrust and complex case litigator, before returning to the FTC where he ultimately served for three years as Acting Regional Director of the Los Angeles Regional Office, where he headed a staff of 53 attorneys, investigators and support personnel.

He broke into Hollywood as a writer-producer of crime and espionage dramas. Being hired as a producer of Steven Spielberg’s science fiction series seaQuest confirmed him as a science fiction and technological fiction writer as well. To date he has staffed on 12 different television series, including serving as the show runner on The Outer Limits and Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict. He has had two pilots ordered to film; his two-hour pilot Irresistible Force is in release on DVD.

He has shared in a Saturn Award for best science fiction cable series (Farscape) and an Edgar Award for best episode of a television crime series (The Equalizer) and is a member of the Writers Guild of America West, the Writers Guild of Canada, the Mystery Writers of America, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, the American Bar Association, and the California Bar Association, among others, and has served as an instructor in the UCLA Film School’s Professional Screenwriting graduate certificate program and as a guest lecturer for the American Film Institute’s MFA program.

He held four consecutive terms on the Board of Directors of the Writers Guild of America West; having termed-out on the Board, he was appointed to the Guild’s Membership and Finance Committee. He is a past President of PEN Center USA.

He is married to the best-selling novelist, screenwriter and tree-farmer Loraine Despres. His stepson David Mulholland is a journalist and professional broadcast and stand-up comedian.

He is represented for print publication by the Hill Nadell Literary Agency and for television and screen writing by The Stein Agency.