Kandace James is in the MAPW program at Kennesaw State University. She is a screenwriter, poet and painter. During her time in the graduate program, her short screenplay, Cutting Teeth, was officially selected at the Short. Sweet. Film Fest in 2020. Cutting Teeth, also won the 2019 Laurel Award for Best Screenplay at the LA Live Film Festival.

She uses her poetic lens as a tool to tell her stories and often integrate her poetry into her scripts. As a poet, her work has been published in Josephine Quarterly, Aunt Chloe, Sink Hollow and the Brushfire Literature & Arts Journal.

James’ writes stories about the African American experience, gender, and sexual orientation: the intersectionality of their lived experiences, the exclusion of identity within these groups, and the silencing of their voices. She wants to add representation to her screenplays and create narratives that reflect and diversify the Black experience. In her scripts, there are personal moments. She is somewhere in all her stories, but she also takes the time to comment on social and racial issues in direct ways. As a Black, queer, epileptic woman whose masculine-presenting in America, she is cognizant of the lack of representation of the true complexity of African American's reality in film. There has been a rise in the representation of the Black identity in film; however, she desires to reimagine and redefine how blackness is currently depicted—for example in reference to disabilities, mental illness, sexual violence and abuse, and gender expression.

Her writing reflects a push through doubt, the last desperate kick on the door before it swings open. She writes about the overcoming of fear.