Trying to Catch Lightning in a Jar: Letters from Prison by Patty Prewitt
“Life with no parole for fifty years. That’s what my paperwork reads. I saw it in print the day I arrived.”
So begins Patty Prewitt’s epistolary memoir, Trying to Catch Lightning in a Jar, describing the first eighteen years of her incarceration in various Missouri women's prisons.
Her letters tell the nightmarish story of incarceration while also describing her daily attempts at making the best of the situation with keen observation, humor, and compassion for those around her. Patty served thirty-eight years before her sentence was commuted.
Read an excerpt from Trying to Catch Lightning in a Jar on the 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.