Poetry Fellow Melissa Range awarded 2025 Vanderbilt University Literary Prize
Printer’s Fist, by Melissa Range, has been selected as the 2025 winner of the Vanderbilt University Literary Prize. The prize competition received more than 250 submissions. Spearheaded by General Editor Major Jackson, with the assistance of Professors Didi Jackson, Rick Hilles and a small team of graduate students. From these semifinalists, Jackson chose the winning manuscript.
Printer’s Fist is about the abolitionist movement in the 18th and 19th century United States. Drawing upon archival research into 19th century antislavery newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides, songsters, children’s books, poetry, letters and more, this collection tells the story of a political movement—its strides and setbacks, its unity and fractures—with a particular focus on its print culture.
Melissa Range also is the author of Scriptorium, a winner of the 2015 National Poetry Series (Beacon Press, 2016), and Horse and Rider (Texas Tech University Press, 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.
Read the full article published by Vanderbilt University.
