JACKSON, Miss.—Ellen Morris Prewitt sat with her back against the only unwindowed wall in Lemuria Books not drenched in shelves, signing copies of her new book “When We Were Murderous Time-Traveling Women” as fans trickled across the store’s emerald-green carpets and mosaic wood floors.
The crowd who showed up for the April 16 author event overflowed beyond Lemuria’s humble stash of extra chairs, flanked by older men mounted on book ladders to get a look at Prewitt as Ebony Lumumba, chair of Jackson State English Department, joined her for a talk about her new book.
While other customers filtered through around the 30-something person audience, Prewitt prefaced the discussion by reading the first chapter of her book aloud.
She wasted no time with exposition. The audience was thrown directly into the life of the main character: a woman who accidentally summons figures from the past into 2018 New Orleans during the city’s tricentennial celebration.
“I’m trying to tell this story straight, which is so, so hard to do, because who understands something the first time it happens?” Prewitt said, reading her character’s thoughts aloud. “Truth is, I had been making up stuff since I fled my first Mississippi killing. First, you might ask? But the women in my family never seem to stop.”
The crowd broke out in laughter twice in two lines as Prewitt read, slipping almost a dozen jokes into the first chapter alone.
“Ellen doesn’t give us time to breathe or take a deep breath,” Lumumba said to the audience before turning to Prewitt. “And you also don’t spare the drama.”
‘Mississippi Humor’
Prewitt and Lumumba spent just under an hour discussing “When We Were Murderous Time Traveling Women,” exploring themes of ancestral truths, filling the gaps in family histories, life beyond death, Mississippi’s literary tradition, trauma and the dark sense of humor that Mississippians sometimes use to deal with it all.
“It’s not just a southern humor; it’s a Mississippi humor,” Prewitt said.
She told a story about attending a North Carolina showing of “Crimes of the Heart,” a dark comedy about three southern sisters reuniting after one shoots her abusive husband, with her Mississippi family to explain what she means when she says “Mississippi humor.”
“We went to the movies watching ‘Crimes of the Heart,’ these three Mississippi girls and our mom, and we are the only ones in the theater who are losing it because it’s so funny—she’s about to put her head in the oven,” Prewitt said as her audience laughed. “I just think it might be a little bit Mississippi.”
“I think it’s very Mississippi, right?” Lumumba asked rhetorically. “How many sorta things do we just have to laugh at and then move on? It’s inescapable, but we’re not going to sit in the trauma; we’re going to add some trauma-edy, right?”
A Basis in Reality
Three of Prewitt’s characters are based on her own grandmothers—a wealthy white woman in Jackson, a well-known writer in Vicksburg and a Native American woman in Lawrence County, Mississippi—and how they had to fend for and defend themselves in real life.
Historical records show one of the women lost an arm, but don’t explain how that situation came to be, while another had to fight her father-in-law in court from Jackson, Mississippi, after he tried to disinherit her when her husband died out-of-state, Prewitt said at the event.
“Researching so much about my family, I have read so much about history, so many histories and reconstruction, history and everything, and it was told with such a slant (that) I’m thinking, ‘So many professional historians got this wrong—I can fill in the gaps,’” Prewitt said.
The author needed to fill the gaps in that history with speculative fiction to bring her characters to life, she said.
“I got to create new grandmothers because I cannot (fully) base a character on (the) real-life person,” Prewitt said. “… They don’t ever come alive on the page; they can’t come alive because they’re already dead.”
While Mississippi authors have a long history of dealing with themes of memory, trauma and history in their writing, Prewitt’s approach is different, Lumumba said.
“Mississippi writers, we tend to write about the past as if it is fixed (in time), like there’s nothing that we can do about it, but what your novel, I think, suggests is that history as we know it is revisable,” Lumumba suggested to Prewitt.
From Blog to Book
Prewitt began writing “When We Were Murderous Time-Traveling Women” to entertain herself after literary agents were unable to sell manuscripts of three different novels she had previously written.
She spent about eight months writing it before setting it in a drawer. She posted some chapters on her blog, but eventually grew bored and stopped posting.
“I was a member of this wonderful little writing group, and we would give each other prompts, and then you had to come the next month with your homework, and one month I hadn’t done my homework, and so I thought, ‘Oh, I think that first chapter in that old novel, I think that’s responsive to that prompt,’” Prewitt recalled.
Her peers’ positive feedback in that writing group reignited her interest in the novel and inspired her to hunker down on editing it.
“Because of my experience with agents, I just went straight to a small press and worked with an editor who was from Alabama,” Prewitt said. “It was wonderful because she absolutely got it and was very supportive of it, just thrilled with it. … I could not have asked for a better editing process.”
Prewitt’s Alabama editor Cindy Bryan, who works for publisher Literary Wanderlust, chose Prewitt’s book for publication, with the approval of her senior editor.
“Ellen’s book was just so creative and so original; it just stood out to me from the beginning,” Bryan said. “From the first paragraph, I thought, ‘I’ve definitely not read anything like this before.’ … It was fresh, and it was original, and it just pulled me in, and I was hooked. I just absolutely loved it, and I still do.”
Bryan and Prewitt worked to publish “When We Were Murderous Time-Traveling Women” together for just under a year, and it officially launched on April 1, 2026.
To continue promoting Prewitt is speaking at Ellenpalooza, a literary event for which Prewitt is a featured guest alongside documentarian Ellen Ann Fentress and poet Ellen Gabardi, held at the 100 Men Hall in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, on Saturday, May 16, from 10 a.m. to noon. Rachel Dangermond will lead the discussion held between the three authors.
Prewitt will also be featured in a digital discussion with Lauren Rhoades as part of Rooted Magazine’s Bottom Feeder Book Club on Wednesday, May 27, at 7 p.m.
Previous events on Morris’ tour of her new book include her launch event at Orange Couch Coffee Shop in New Orleans, Louisiana, on April 2 and a book signing at Novel Bookstore in Memphis, Tennessee, on May 2. Morris also appeared on WREG Memphis on May 1.
Find the novel available for purchase on the Jackson author’s website, at Lemuria Books and on Amazon. The physical paperback book is $17.99 retail, and a digital version is available for Kindle at $6.99.
Disclosure: Ellen Morris Prewitt is a donor to the Mississippi Free Press, which did not influence the coverage of this topic.
