Printer's Fist: Poems - Paperback

by Melissa Range (Author), Major Jackson (Foreword by)

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 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.

Author Biography

Melissa Range is the author of Scriptorium, winner of the 2015 National Poetry Series competition, and Horse and Rider, a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Prize. Her 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, and MacDowell. Originally from East Tennessee, she teaches creative writing and American literature at Lawrence University in Wisconsin.