Melissa Range’s Printer’s Fist, awarded the 2025 Vanderbilt University Literary Prize, is a collection that tells the story of a political movement—its strides and setbacks, its unity and fractures—with a particular emphasis on print culture. Drawing upon more than a decade’s worth of archival research into nineteenth-century antislavery newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides, and more, Range highlights the expansiveness of the movement by focusing not on one, but a chorus of abolitionist voices. Her investment in celebrating Black and women's histories, in particular, offers an inclusive account of US American history, informed not only by thorough research but through a formal, poetic engagement with the past. In exploring how enslaved people’s self-emancipation was a form of resistance that preceded, operated alongside, and intertwined with organized networks of antislavery activists, Printer’s Fist will help facilitate discussions surrounding race, gender, and activism that are grounded in historical fact and emotional truth.

Melissa Range is the author of Scriptorium, winner of the 2015 National Poetry Series (2016), and Horse and Rider (2010), a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Prize. Recent poems have appeared in Ecotone, The Hopkins Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Nation and Ploughshares. Range has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Rona Jaffe Foundation, the American Antiquarian Society, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and MacDowell. Originally from East Tennessee, she teaches creative writing and American literature at Lawrence University in Wisconsin.

To the Public

Juno

Righteousness Exalteth a Nation
In the Years Before the Antislavery Societies Formed
Fort Mose
From the Subscriber
Index: Gabriel’s Conspiracy
Thomas Branagan Sends His Poem The PenitentialTyrant to Thomas Jefferson
The Gradualists Wait
William Lloyd Garrison Apprentices as a Printer’s Devil at the Newburyport Herald
Winny v. Whitesides, Decided for the Plaintiff
At Denmark Vesey’s Church

Our Country Is the World—Our Countrymen Are All Mankind
Benjamin Lundy Relocates the Genius of Universal Emancipation
John B. Russwurm, Editor of Freedom’s Journal, Reverses his Position
David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World Goes South
Angelina Grimké Ruins Her Clothes
Another Southern Manumission Society Disbands
James Forten, Sailmaker, Sends William Lloyd Garrison Twenty-Seven Paid Subscriptions for the First Issue of the Liberator
Elizabeth Margaret Chandler Passes on Dessert
Garrison Issues the Call in the Liberator

Liberty is the Word for Me—Above All, Liberty
Noyes Academy
James G. Birney, Editor of the Philanthropist, is Fairly Egged Off the Ground
The Philadelphia Female Antislavery Society’s Third Annual Petition Drive
The House of Representatives Passes the “Gag Rule”
Reverend Elijah P. Lovejoy, Editor of the Alton Observer
Sarah Louisa Forten Does Not Speak from the Archives
Abby Kelley Lectures Against Slavery in a One-Room Schoolhouse
The Grimké Sisters at Work on American Slavery As It Is
The American Antislavery Society Splits after Abby Kelley is Elected to the Business Committee 

Right Is of No Sex—Truth Is of No Color
Come-Outers
After the Split, The National Antislavery Standard Publishes Its First Issue
Black Women Split Off
Julia Williams Garnet Collaborates with Reverend Henry Highland Garnet on an Address to the Slaves of the United States of America
The National Colored Convention Subcommittee Votes 19-18 Not to Endorse An Address to the Slaves of the United States of America
Frederick Douglass Publishes the First Issue of the North Star
Black and White Women Continue Working Together
Preparations for Another Antislavery Bazaar Continue
Minutes

Without Concealment, Without Compromise
Minty, Moses
William Wells Brown Performs from The Antislavery Harp
Cottonocracy
The Train from Macon
Public Opinion Shifts After the Passing of the Fugitive Slave Law
Clementine Averill Writes to Senator Jeremiah Clemens
Harriet Beecher Stowe Writes Chapter Nine of Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Mary Ann Shadd Advocates Emigration in Notes of Canada West
Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison Officially Split

No Union with Slaveholders
William Still, General Vigilance Committee Secretary, Takes Notes
Martin R. Delany Writes in to Frederick Douglass’ Paper about Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Fourth of July with the Massachusetts Antislavery Society
Colporteur
Frances Ellen Watkins Lodges Two Weeks with Mary Brown
To the Slave Power
Enter the Wide-Awakes
“Written by Herself” (I)

Devoted to the Rights of All Mankind
John Greenleaf Whittier Argues with Himself about the Use of Force
First South
Harriet Jacobs Writes in to the Liberator about the Condition of the Freed People
Special Edition: Lincoln’s Proclamation of Emancipation
Black Teachers Mobilize, All Parts South
Quartermaster Sergeant James H. Payne, 27th U.S.C.T., Ohio, Writes in to the Christian Recorder
George Moses Horton, Poet
Levy Done Places an “Information Wanted” Ad in the Colored Tennessean
“Written by Herself” (II)

For the Abolitionist Dead

Notes