“My life will be defined not by where I live it, but by how I spend it...”
So said Dewey Bozella when he arrived at the gates of Sing Sing to serve a twenty-five-to-life sentence for a murder he didn't commit.
But fighting came naturally to Dewey; he'd been doing it since he'd been born. Starting from witnessing his mother's death at the hands of his father, to the street homicide of his beloved brother, up to his truncated career in the boxing ring, and his wrongful conviction.
This is the true story of how Dewey Bozella served twenty-six years in Sing Sing and lived, experienced, hurt and loved more than most of us are capable of in a lifetime of freedom.
He refused every “plead-guilty-and-go-free” deal made by the prosecutor's office, and stayed strong in the face of impossible odds. He became the premier light-heavyweight boxer on Sing Sing's team. He fell in love and married. And most importantly, he wrote weekly messages to the Innocence Project until they took up his case and worked to secure his freedom, finally undoing a quarter-century of wrongs.
However, even when his corporeal freedom was assured, life outside prison presented its own challenges. How was he going to find work? Could his marriage survive in the outside world?
Then came the unthinkable: at the age of fifty-two, Dewey was at last given a chance to earn his boxing pro card...
Intimate and epic, Still Standing is a true story that recounts one man's herculean strength and extraordinary resilience in his decades-long struggle to regain his rightful spot in the world and in the boxing ring.
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Nicholas Mennuti is the writer of the espionage thriller Weaponized (Mulholland Books/Little Brown), which had film rights purchased by Universal Pictures and Scott Stuber and Scrap (NeoText). Nicholas's short stories have appeared in AGNI and Conjunctions, and he has written about the intersection of technology and entertainment for the Huffington Post. He is also a graduate of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts Dramatic Writing program.
