Catching Lightning: More Letters from Prison by Patty Prewitt
“Yesterday began as a pretty normal prison day.”
So begins Patty Prewitt’s final letter detailing her unexpected commutation and release from prison after thirty-eight years. In this second book, the follow up to Trying to Catch Lightning in a Jar, Prewitt describes the final twenty years of her incarceration with keen observation, humor, and compassion for those around her, while always maintaining her innocence.
Read an excerpt from Catching Lightning on the Some People Press Substack.
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About the author
Patty Prewitt was born and raised on a cattle ranch near Lone Jack, Missouri. Her writing was first published, in Wee Wisdom magazine, when she was in second grade. During her incarceration, she won a PEN America writing contest and had both prose and poetry published in Wrath-Bearing Tree, the Massachusetts Review, Tampa Review, Tacenda Magazine, Cholla Needles, MiPOesias, and Duende. Two of her plays have been performed at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC. In December 2024, Prewitt was released from prison at age seventy-five, nearly forty years after what she continues to maintain was a wrongful conviction. She resides in Greenwood, Missouri, with family.
“I was a ‘hands-on’ mama. When I was home and I'm doing dishes, I could have a kid next to me. We could talk one-on-one. That's not happening in prison. So at that prison, they had a park bench off to the side. I could tell one of the kids would be looking at me like, ‘My turn.’ So we go over to the park bench and have a little conversation, and sometimes they rat on each other…but it was important to have that time. I could fix some problems, but I couldn’t fix all of the problems—but every kid needs some one-on-one.”