After rejecting plea bargain offers, Patricia Prewitt was convicted and sentenced to life-with-no-parole for 50 years for the 1984 murder of her husband. She and her children insist on her innocence. Now in her 60s with ten grandchildren, she is about halfway through the mandatory minimum of her sentence. She is housed at the Women's Eastern Reception, Diagnostic, and Correctional Center in Vandalia, Missouri, where she writes software and is one of only a handful of female prisoners who has earned Aerobics and Fitness Association of America certification as Personal Fitness Trainer, Griyp Exercise Instructor, and Step Aerobics. Through the Prison Performing Arts program, she has performed as Lady Macbeth, Malvolio, and Bottom. Contraband took the PEN American Center's first prize for nonfiction in 2006. Her poems are posted on her Facebook page. For an interview with her see http://www.pen.orgiviewmedia.php/prmMIDI1789/prmID/1644.
