Pen Pal

When James Jennings discusses strategies for publishing and marketing books, he sounds just like any other hard-charging entrepreneur. Except for the 23 years he’s serving at the federal prison in Seagoville.

A high-school dropout who discovered early that he had a talent for forgery, Jennings has spent a dozen years, off and on, behind bars. In between stays he wrote The Nation’s Master Forger, a book that won him a (temporary) career on the lecture circuit teaching people how to spot forgeries.

Jennings, 54, has earned a college degree in prison and turned to free-lance writing as a means of earning money to repay his victims. His byline has appeared in magazines from Easyriders to Guideposts, and in Sunday newspaper magazines around the country.

With friends on the outside he founded Pipe Dreams Press to publish novelty books-cookbooks for men, etc. He’s working on three novels that he hopes will help him offset his restitulion debt, which is just over $4,000. With a little luck, the model prisoner’s four sentences could be switched to concurrent, freeing him in February.