About Ellen Morris Prewitt

Ellen and Family

As a corporate attorney in 1980s Mississippi, Ellen founded the Health Law Section of the Mississippi State Bar and served as its first president. She was the managing partner of her office and named to  the Top 40 Under 40. 

When Ellen turned to writing, her first book introduced a new form of active prayer using broken and found objects to make crosses (Making Crosses: A Creative Connection to God, Paraclete Press, 2009). Her second book narrated her short story collection, Cain’t Do Nothing with Love, which won the CIPA-EVVY Audio Book Award; the stories have been downloaded world-wide over 50,000 times. She self-published two novels and created a bespoke hand-sewn novel with her talented artist friend Marisa Whitsett Baker.

Her short stories have twice been nominated for Pushcart Prizes; one received a Special Mention. She was the Peter Taylor Fellow at the Kenyon College Summer Writing Program. Sue Silverman included her essay in Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir (University of Georgia Press, 2009) as an example of how to use metaphor. Her work has appeared in Hotel Amerika, Brevity, Image, Alaska Quarterly Review, River Teeth, Texas Review, Gulf Coast, Barrelhouse, EAP the Magazine, Fourth Genre, Arkansas Review, and elsewhere. She constantly interrogates the racism of her beloved American South. 

Inspired by her time with the Memphis School of Servant Leadership, Ellen spent eight years facilitating a weekly writing group of Memphians experiencing homelessness. The group hosted four annual Community Writing Retreats where the housed and unhoused wrote together. Ellen edited the group’s memoir, Writing Our Way Home (Triton Press, 2014) and published the “how to” manual, We R Righting Group. For this work, she was named an Upstander by Facing History and Ourselves, and Champion, Memphis and Shelby County Homeless Consortium. While Artist-in-Residence at St. Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral, she invented Thumb Prayers. She also walked the runway showing clothes. 

Ellen is known to appear in public in costume.

Learn More about Thumb Prayers

My stats:

  • 19 years as a corporate attorney in Jackson, Mississippi

  • 5 years as a radio commentator for WKNO-FM/NPR in Memphis

  • 6 years as a runway model (!)

  • 2 years leading cross-making workshops across the Southeast

  • 8 years facilitating a writing group of Memphians experiencing homelessness

  • 2 years as a contributor to Strut! Magazine, Detroit Free Press

  • 3 (SOON TO BE 4) novels, 2 nonfiction books, 50,000+ downloads of audio short stories

  • 33 literary journal publications

  • 3 anthology selections

  • 2 Pushcart nominations

  • 1 Pushcart Special Mention

  • 5+ Short-List Finalist or Finalist in novel competitions

  • 20+ years volunteering for the Mission Group of the Memphis School of Servant Leadership, Advisory Board of Mid-South Literacy, Artist-in-Residence at St. Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral, guest lecturer for Women’s Prison Stories, keynote speaker at Mississippi Writers Guild, Guest lecturer for MIFA’s Dr. Martin Luther King Teen Oratorical Contest, Executive Committee of the Women’s Foundation of Greater Memphis, and Member of the 100 Women DBA of the 100 Men’s Hall, Bay St. Louis, Mississippi.

  • 18 years and counting as a writer

“St. Paul admonishes us that we cannot all be a foot. I figure in the body of Christ, I’m the appendix. I have a vital function, just no one knows what it is yet.”
Ellen Morris Prewitt

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