COMING SOON - Thorns of the Mesquite - Out 11/15/25
Dona Rose Willis’s life on a vast West Texas ranch in 1938, is shaped by hard work, a starkly beautiful landscape, and a loveless marriage. Everything shifts when her orphaned niece, Annalou, arrives, and Samuel Washington, a Black man, seeks refuge from a lynch mob, thrusting Dona into a dangerous fight against brutal prejudices.
A powerful and timely tale of historic fiction, Thorns of the Mesquite paints a stirring portrait of a woman’s awakening—of love and the resilient spirit demanded to fight for what’s right against staggering odds.
Patricia’s debut historical fiction novel is available for pre-order from Leveller’s Press below.
Previous works
A Kind of Yellow is a chapbook of 25 poems by Patricia Lee Lewis, MFA, Pushcart Prize nominee and founder of Patchwork Farm Writing Retreat. The poems tell a loosely consistent story, beginning with a little girl in Texas, and move through her pregnancy at 16, birth of her son, his mental illness and suicide.
As award-winning poet Richard Jackson said of some of these poems, “…there is movement from the physical to the transcendent, from the self outward, and each poem gathers definitions as it moves along, like lines or images in a poem.”
The book becomes in itself, a poem.
A Kind of Yellow won first place in Writers Digest’s International Poetry Competition.
Available below from Leveller’s Press.
High Lonesome is a pasture on a West Texas ranch, a state of being, an affecting personal mythology. Poet Patricia Lee Lewis writes,
“Think how brambles catch her petticoats, hold them ’til they tear, feed on blood….Say the old woman can find her way, can feel the thorns of walls.”
These are poems of landscape and family, heart and perspective.
“High Lonesome pulls you into the momentum of its sounds with urgency, shock, serenity and arrival. The language of Patricia Lee Lewis is devoted to noticing. Her poems digest the howling, look at what comforts, what invades to do harm, what remains.” – Anne Love Woodhull, poet, author of Night With Its Owl
Available below from Leveller’s Press.