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, the prize committee reviewed each submission in advance of the jurists, Victoria Chang, Dana Levin and Gregory Pardlo, who selected nine semifinalists. From these semifinalists, Jackson chose the winning manuscript. Honorable mentions are extended to Ugochukwu Damian Okpara’s Excarnation and Jarrett Moseley’s Rehumanization Litany. Other outstanding submissions recognized were from Alfredo Aguilar, Jia-Rui Cook, Jeremy Teddy Karn, Victoria Kornick, Maggie Queeney and Laura Villareal.
The prize includes publication of the winning manuscript in print, electronic and audio formats by Vanderbilt University Press, a $10,000 honorarium, an invitation to read in the esteemed Gertrude C. and Harold S. Vanderbilt Reading Series at Vanderbilt University, and a one-week residency on campus to engage students and local writers in the Nashville community.
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.
“I wrote Printer’s Fist as a monument to activists from the past whose work for justice is relevant to us today,” Range said. “I’m deeply grateful to the judges for believing that these stories from the 19th century need to be heard, and I’m honored and thrilled to have Vanderbilt University Press publish this collection.”
“Melissa’s work demonstrates the conceptual and linguistic strengths of a seasoned poet working at full tilt,” said Gianna Mosser, director of Vanderbilt University Press. “Printer’s Fist reflects on the enduring capacity of language to captivate and communicate even the most challenging parts of human relations.”
Major Jackson, the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English and director of creative writing, said, “Melissa Range’s historic sensibility and applied poetics enliven an important period in American democracy, currently at risk of being expunged from classrooms and libraries. Printer’s Fist reasserts the bedrock principles of freedom and human dignity and centers the many individuals who contributed to our country’s understanding of itself as a nation built on equality and justice.”
“Melissa Range’s Printer’s Fist flies squarely in the face of exclusionary American history to counter efforts to privilege a particular perspective,” jurist Gregory Pardlo said. “The manuscript does more than include archival material. Part of the play and, ironically, joy of this manuscript is the way Range uses the archive as poetic form. This is probably what I find most astonishing about this collection, that while it remains fervently committed to its ethical assertions, the play of this poet’s mind across its subject matter points us toward further discovery and reflection.”
The Vanderbilt University Literary Prize seeks to recognize works of poetry whose originality is immediately identifiable in how the book renews our relationship to language; delves into underexplored areas of human experience; and makes claims on our lives that are urgent and aesthetic while also enacting historical, social, literary, political or spiritual awareness. The prize is a collaboration of Vanderbilt University Press and Vanderbilt University’s Department of English and MFA in Creative Writing Program, and is made possible with the support of the McEntire Literary Prize Endowment.
Printer’s Fist is scheduled for publication in March 2026 from Vanderbilt University Press. Range will be in residence for a week in spring 2026 to engage students, faculty and the greater community with her work.
For further inquiries or information about the prize, visit vanderbilt.edu/vuliteraryprize or contact VU Literary Administrator Patrick Samuel at vuliteraryprize@vanderbilt.edu.
