Ezra Graff: For those who haven't gotten a chance to read it yet, Melissa Range's Printer's Fist chronicles the abolitionist movement leading up to and through the Civil War, with poems that reference primary sources, such as newspapers, speeches, letters, and poems. Melissa, what was the process like for creating this book?
Melissa Range: I always love to talk about process. I was getting my PhD at the University of Missouri, and one of my advisors who taught 19th century American lit, Alex Socarides, suggested I read Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and John Greenleaf Whittier, two poets who were new to me and who were both involved in and writing about the abolitionist movement. After I read them, I wanted to know more about them.
Then that turned into wanting to learn about the abolitionist movement. Why don't I know about this movement? Why was I never taught this? [My advisor] had been a fellow at the American Antiquarian Society, working on a scholarly book, and she said, this place is an incredible archive. It's in Worcester, Massachusetts, and they do fellowships for scholars and creative writers. And so I applied, got in, and started looking at abolitionist newspapers. I was amazed and enamored by the print culture, but that was just the start. That was 2013.
I got interested in the hugeness of the movement, and what makes a political movement work. Especially when everyone's arguing about methods and many other things, and there's racism in the movement, and there's sexism in the movement, but somehow it worked anyway.
At first, I was kind of taking small bits of text from these authors and writing about them and using some of their words in my poems. As I kept going with the project, I realized that I was wasting an opportunity because their words are so powerful. And so I wanted to work in more of their words. It's basically: research, take notes, see if you can weave some of their words into the poems, and see if you can do it with a poetic form that's interesting. I got interested in the triolets as a form that could help me zoom out. Because they're so short, there's not much you can do. Where a lot of the poems are focusing on this person, or that person, I feel like the triolets say here's what's happening in the movement right now on a big picture level. Then we zoom back into the different people.
EG: I want to know more about your grade school education on the abolitionist movement as a student in Tennessee.
MR: Zero! Zero. I do think that there is probably an underlying educational rage that also propelled this book. I remember In 7th grade, we had East Tennessee History. I remember the teacher saying, oh, well, slavery wasn't that much of a thing in East Tennessee. It's this kind of myth that people didn't enslave people in East Tennessee, or that East Tennessee went for the Union so we're the good part of Tennessee. Growing up, I did not question that myth. And then as I started investigating it as an adult, I was just like, okay, so people did enslave people in East Tennessee. And East Tennessee people were plenty racist, and, you know, just because they wanted to stay in the Union doesn't mean that they were against slavery.
There were some early abolitionists who started in East Tennessee. A poem that didn't make it in the book is about this guy named Elihu Embree. He actually started the first abolitionist newspaper in the whole country, and it was from Jonesborough, Tennessee. It was called The Emancipator. He published it for about a year, and then he got one of those 19th century fevers and died. But he also was an enslaver, and he enslaved a woman, Nancy, and her children. He does not forgive himself for what he does, but he also cannot seem to scrape together the money that the state's manumission laws require to legally emancipate this family. That's just one example of a contradictory intersection of slavery and abolition in East Tennessee; I'm sure there are many others.
There was a manumission society in early East Tennessee active in the 1810s, but by the end of the 1820s it’s defunct because the pro-slavery environment is squashing that out. So those people are moving to the Midwest or the North if they want to keep on with their activism.
I learned none of that in seventh grade. It's no surprise. This was 1980s East Tennessee. I think the thing I learned about the Civil War was that it was about states' rights. I hope people are getting a better education now, but I don't know that they are.
I began to feel anger that most abolitionists are not known, because the legacy of this movement is one of the true legacies of democracy and activism and justice. There should be statues to all these people. These people should be the ones we learn about. The historical oversimplification is that Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, but these people working together pushed the country in the direction of emancipation.
EG: In your research, did you observe any reoccurring structures or literary devices that were, you know, used across abolitionist literature, and did the craft of these historic writers influence your writing in this text?
MR: I noticed that there's all these abolitionist rhyming pairs that repeat throughout these poems. Most contemporary readers would say oh, those are just cliched bad rhymes, and I'm like, oh! But what a political purpose these rhymes have! Sold and gold. Chains and veins. Chains and stains. Country and liberty. Me and liberty. Slave and grave. Slave and wave. Slave and brave. These awesome rhymes that repeat across abolitionist poets, and I thought that was fascinating. I like to rhyme anyway and I find the challenge really animates my brain in a good way. It pushes me to go places I wouldn't have gone. But I was especially excited to see how they were rhyming. That definitely made me even more excited to do that.
And they wrote a lot of ballads. I think the first one I wrote was the Frances Ellen Watkins Harper one. If I'm writing a poem about her, it has to be a ballad. She wrote so many. And so I have to try this, even if it sounds really strange and old-fashioned. And I think it does sound old-fashioned, but I don't think that's a bad thing. I really wanted to do a poetic homage to some of these abolitionist poets.
EG: Within socially engaged art, particularly that which reflects on truly horrific events and systems and structures, there's a tension between abstraction and direct representation. How did you choose to navigate this and this challenge in your collection?
MR: It evolved as I evolved. There’s a gazillion pages of notes because I had to just keep reading and learning. I’m not gonna say that I did it “right,” but I tried my best to educate myself and to write these poems conscientiously.
William Wells Brown was a formerly enslaved man who self-emancipated and became an abolitionist. He wrote this novel called Clotel, which is this wild collage. It's super experimental and weird, from the 1850s. I love him. He said, “Slavery has never been represented, slavery never can be represented.” I took these words to heart. I obviously wasn't there, and I'm not trying to represent it, because I agree that something that horrific cannot be represented.
I wanted to understand how abolitionists would try to motivate other people to join the movement. They're trying to think about how they can make somebody care about this issue. One way that people do that, especially through poetry and visual art, is to use emotional appeals. So for example, in abolitionist print materials, there are a lot of recurring violent images. Some of which we might question, or think that they're so graphic as to feel exploitative.
Common images are the breaking up of families and violence against women. Abolitionists would use that imagery, and whether they should or not, I can't really answer that question, you know?
One thing I had to wrestle with was how can I nod to that imagery? Because it was important to the movement’s activist work, but then how can I also get away from that imagery, too? Because I don't want to exploit Black people from the past in my words that I'm writing now. But the history of slavery is a history of violence and breaking up families, and no one could pretend otherwise, and so how do I navigate that?
I also thought about the larger issue of voice in this book. I am not trying to give voice to any of these people. They have their own voices. They left behind a lot of writing. But what I want to do is kind of shine a light on people of the past and be like, hey, look at these cool people! And that's why my notes at the end of the book are so voluminous. If you're interested in Henry Highland Garnet, here are some sources you could read. You could find out more about him! My greatest hope is that this book could get readers interested in the primary sources.
EG: I listened to your 2018 interview with Josephine Reed and you said, “I'm always interested in how can I see parallels between my life and lives that have gone before me. How can I see parallel situations in the country or in the world with what has gone before.” That was in reference to your second book, Scriptorium. What parallels are you seeing with this new collection?
MR: Oh, so many. I see so many. I think anyone who does any kind of activism, big or small scale, can see parallels just as far as, what does it mean for a group of people to come together and work together and argue and try to work together and cooperate and do something good. Even if you really respect the people you’re doing activism with, there will be arguments and disagreements, especially about tactics. Everybody has a different idea. It's so slow, it takes forever. It takes forever to do anything good, and it's so easy to give up. And yet, somehow these people did not.
Do you know Race and Reunion by the scholar David Blight?
EG: No, I’m not familiar.
MR: His theory is that there are three types of Civil War memory that evolved in the 50-60 years after the Civil War. So, late 19th, early 20th century. He said there's the Confederate or Lost Cause memory, which I certainly grew up hearing and which goes something like, “they were noble, and they fought for their homeland,” and blah blah blah. Then there's the Union, or Reunionist, kind of memory, which is all about keeping the country together, and, after the war, what everybody really wants to do is just bring the country back together and mend it. See, it wasn't broken! And then the third strand of Civil War memory is the most important strand - The Emancipationist Memory, which states that the importance of the Civil War was emancipation. In the decades immediately following the war, that is the strand that gets squashed until the Civil Rights movement. And I can see parallels right now with how our government officials want to remember (or not remember) slavery, abolition, and emancipation.
Another parallel that comes to mind: people in power, particularly Andrew Jackson and fools like that, those people really wanted the abolitionists to go away. And they would do everything from mob violence to suppressing abolitionist mail campaigns. There were all these abolitionist petitions sent to Congress, and Congress tabled them all for years. They had this “gag rule” where they wouldn't look at any of them.
So, I do think that there are plenty of parallels with how this country is right now. This country has never lived up to not only the Declaration of Independence, but it's also never lived up to what these abolitionists were trying to do. There's still hope. But we have to look our history full in the face. You know, we could learn from our history and not try to ignore it because it's uncomfortable to talk about.
EG: I was really struck by the resonance of the lines “They heard and kept doing, or heard and did more, / with and without funding, with and without fear.” Can you talk about the origin of these lines, and what significance does it hold to you now?
MR: Mmm, yes. I was thinking about how strapped for cash these abolitionist organizations were, especially early on, there was always some little newspaper coming up and going under because they couldn't fund it. There were always people going out and giving speeches and lectures to try to recruit more volunteers, more activists. Sometimes those people got paid. Sometimes there wasn't money to pay them.
Funding these movements came from women. Women were the ones who organized antislavery fundraising fairs, and they did all kinds of other fundraising work. It's so important, the work they did. People felt so convicted that they were like, well, even if I can't get paid to do all this labor, I'm just gonna do it anyway.
And I think about their fear. It's scary sometimes to do justice work because you don't know who's gonna come after you. That's definitely true today. It was true back then. Of course, they must have been afraid, but they just did it anyway. That bravery is really incredible to me.
And then the other lines, “they heard and kept doing, or heard and did more.” I was thinking about the Liberator, which was an amazing abolitionist newspaper. William Lloyd Garrison, the editor, was such a damn firebrand. He had such a singularity of purpose, and his tone and his writing are just incredible. He's so angry, he's so sarcastic. A lot of times people trace the beginning of the abolitionist movement to the beginning of the Liberator in 1831. While that newspaper did galvanize the movement in a lot of ways, it wasn't the beginning of it, and I really wanted to be clear in that poem that people already doing this work weren't waiting for Garrison to tell them that now was the time.
And that's true always. Even if we think, like, oh, well, this social justice movement was led by this one person. Well, there's always somebody already doing something. Maybe they're not organized, and maybe whoever is already doing the work is doing it in a small way, and they're not some charismatic leader that everyone remembers, but you know, they're doing things in their small way. When I think about some of the people in that poem, like the woman whose house is a safe house on the route up to Canada for self-emancipated fugitives, and so part of her work is cooking breakfast for them, and maybe she's just gonna do that all the time. And maybe her main activism work is taking care of them and helping them get to the next stop. She wasn't waiting for anyone to tell her to do that, she was just doing it. And I think that that's good for all of us to remember. We can do lots of things, and even if they're small, they still make a difference. And so I think that's part of where those lines come from.
EG: You've already provided, like, a whole syllabus of references. We're just gonna keep adding on to that. Are there writers or artists from any time period who engage with archives and primary source documents in their work that you admire?
MR: Oh my gosh, there's so many. I know I listed some of them in my acknowledgements section, but just to add a few more: Tyehimba Jess’s Olio is such an incredible archival book about late 19th and early 20th century Black music. It's impeccably researched , and it's formally so inventive. I mean, it's just really incredible. Definitely that one.
Definitely Native Guard, which is one of my favorite books of all time. The way that Natasha Trethewey braids together, history, and then personal stuff, and then weaves it together. She has three sections, so it's personal, historical, and then personal-historical, woven together. Just amazing.
I love Kiki Petrosino's work just in general. I think she's such a great poet, and her book White Blood is very archivally driven and full of villanelles. I just don't know how she does it.
Laura Da’ is an Indigenous poet whose work I just love. Her second book, Instruments of the True Measure, thinks about surveying and mapping as an act of genocide. The historical detail she uses is just fantastic. She’s brilliant.
EG: What does it mean to you to come down to Tennessee with this book and do different events around Nashville during this current legislative session? And what does it feel like to come home with this collection?
MR: I am happy to be a part of doing things in my home state that are about social justice, you know, because I have a lot of love for Tennessee, and people are always giving my state a bad rap. But I also know that my state has lots of problems. I mean, I know the problems of East Tennessee better than the problems of the rest, but we have lots of problems, just like we have lots of problems as a country. And so, I'm really honored to come to my home state and read from this book.
It's kind of more personal in some ways, because I felt like growing up, I knew I wanted to be a writer, and I felt I really had to fuel that dream myself because my teachers were just like, you want to do what? And I'm a first-gen Appalachian college student, and my family initially was just like… what? I really had to propel myself to what I wanted to do, and to be able to come give a reading in my home state, and someone be like, oh yes, and here's a poet from Tennessee. It's amazing that this ever happened. I feel very grateful and very humbled by it all.
I'm especially excited to read my one Nashville poem which is about The Colored Tennessean, a Black newspaper publishing in Nashville just after the Civil War. It will feel amazing to read that poem in Nashville, to think about that history. It’s always interesting to think about the history of any place when you're giving a reading and how you intersect with that history.
Melissa Range is the winner of the 2025 Vanderbilt Literary Prize for her third poetry collection, Printer’s Fist (Vanderbilt University Press, 2026), as well as the author of Scriptorium (Beacon Press, 2016) and Horse and Rider (Texas Tech University Press, 2010). She is the recipient of 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. She teaches creative writing and American literature at Lawrence University in Wisconsin.
Ezra Graff is an educator, poet, and librarian for the Free Nashville Poetry Library.