The Vanderbilt University Literary Prize Inaugural Winner: Stephanie Niu, I Would Define the Sun
The Vanderbilt University Literary Prize will be awarded annually to the sole author of a full-length collection of poetry that demonstrates great poignancy combined with rigor in form, language and artistic vision.
A collaboration between Vanderbilt University’s Office of the Chancellor, Vanderbilt University Press, and Vanderbilt University’s English Department and MFA Program, the annual contest seeks to identify works of poetry whose originality is immediately identifiable in how the book, in some combination, renews our relationship to language and expands our conception of poetry; delves into underexplored areas of human experience; makes claims on our lives that are urgent and aesthetic; or promotes historical, social, literary, political, or spiritual awareness.
The Vanderbilt University Literary Prize is made possible with the support of the McEntire Literary Prize Endowment.
Spearheaded by Professor Major Jackson, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities, Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing, this prize continues the university’s legacy and on-going commitment to discovering new voices and to supporting the arts as transformative and essential to our community.
The Vanderbilt University Literary Prize in Poetry is open to poets twenty-one years of age or older, at any stage in their career, who are writing in English. Manuscripts must be an original work composed by a single poet. Individual poems may have been previously published in periodicals, chapbooks, or anthologies, but may not have been previously published in a full-length collection. Poets do not need to be US-based but all prize monies will be subject to international tax withholding. We are committed to an ethical and transparent process that maintains fairness and promotes the literary arts. There can be no conflict of interest between applicants and the advisory board or series general editor. Current faculty, students, and graduates of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Vanderbilt University are ineligible.
Winning manuscripts will be published in print, e-book, and audio formats by Vanderbilt University Press, accompanied by a standard publishing contract.
The prize recipient will receive a $10,000 honorarium, an invitation to read in the esteemed Gertrude C. and Harold S. Reading Series at Vanderbilt University, and a one-week residency on campus to engage students and local writers in the Nashville community.
Submissions for the 2026 Vanderbilt University Literary Prize will open January 1, 2026.
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 two hundred and fifty 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 recognized outstanding submissions were from Alfredo Aguilar, Jia-Rui Cook, Jeremy Teddy Karn, Victoria Kornick, Maggie Queeney, and Laura Villareal.
The prize includes the 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 eighteenth and nineteenth century United States. Drawing upon archival research into nineteenth 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 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 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. 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. I’m deeply grateful to the judges for believing that these stories from the nineteenth century need to be heard, and I’m honored and thrilled to have Vanderbilt University Press publish this collection,” Range said.
“Melissa’s work demonstrates the conceptual and linguistic strengths of a seasoned poet working at full tilt. Printer’s Fist reflects on the enduring capacity of language to captivate and communicate even the most challenging parts of human relations,” said Gianna Mosser, director of Vanderbilt University Press.
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.”
A collaboration of Vanderbilt University Press and Vanderbilt University’s English Department and MFA in Creative Writing Program, and made possible with the support of the McEntire Literary Fund, the VU 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.
Printer’s Fist is scheduled for publication in March 2026 from Vanderbilt University Press. Melissa 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 www.vanderbilt.edu/vuliteraryprize, or contact VU Literary Administrator Patrick Samuel at vuliteraryprize@vanderbilt.edu.
Vanderbilt University is pleased to announce Stephanie Niu as the inaugural winner of the Vanderbilt University Literary Prize.
A panel of jurists selected Niu’s I Would Define the Sun, a collection of poems about resisting scarcity through language.
The Vanderbilt University Literary Prize was launched earlier this year in celebration of the institution’s Sesquicentennial and was made possible with the support of the McEntire Literary Prize Endowment. It will be awarded annually to the sole author of a full-length collection of poetry that demonstrates great poignancy combined with rigor in form, language and artistic vision. The contest drew more than 300 entries.
A collaboration of Vanderbilt’s Office of the Chancellor, Vanderbilt University Press and Vanderbilt’s English Department and MFA in Creative Writing Program, the contest 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.
“At this moment of global political upheaval, dizzying technological advancement and general uncertainty, literature—and poetry in particular—is unmatched in its ability to help us pause and reflect deeply on our lives, our times and what it means to be human,” Chancellor Daniel Diermeier said. “My office is proud to support the Vanderbilt University Literary Prize and to affirm the importance of the literary arts at Vanderbilt. I offer my warmest congratulations to Stephanie Niu on her fine achievement, and we look forward to welcoming her to campus.”
The prize includes the publication of the winning manuscript in print, electronic and audio formats, a publishing contract with 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 writers in the Nashville community.
Niu is a poet and writer from Marietta, Georgia. She is the author of the chapbooks Survived By: An Atlas of Disappearance (winner of the 2023 Host Publications Chapbook Prize) and She Has Dreamt Again of Water (winner of the 2021 Diode Editions Chapbook Contest). Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, The Missouri Review, Literary Hub, Copper Nickel, Ecotone Magazine and other publications. She holds a bachelor’s degree in symbolic systems and a master’s degree in computer science from Stanford University. She received a Fulbright scholarship for research on Christmas Island’s labor history, through which she led youth poetry workshops and published the zine Our Island, Our Future. She lives in New York City.
Niu said she’s thrilled to be the inaugural Vanderbilt University Literary Prize winner.
“It still feels surreal to have my first full-length collection honored by this prize and to know that such an esteemed group of poets, many of whom are longtime inspirations, believe in my work,” Niu said.
I Would Define the Sun is scheduled for publication in February 2025 by Vanderbilt University Press. Niu will be in residence on campus for a week in spring 2025 to engage with students, faculty and the broader community.
“I am honored to be publishing Stephanie’s collection as part of a prize that creates simultaneous print, electronic and audio editions in combination with an immersive campus residency designed to engage Vanderbilt and Nashville’s literary communities,” said Gianna Mosser, director of Vanderbilt University Press. “This type of support for the arts is a benchmark of innovative excellence in university press publishing collaborations.”
Jurists for the prize included several esteemed poets, writers, editors and educators, including Professor Major Jackson, Major Jackson, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English and director of creative writing. Jurists Victoria Chang, Dana Levin and Gregory Pardlo selected nine semifinalists. From that pool, Jackson selected the winner. Honorable mentions were awarded to Wesley Rothman’s Wanted and Samyak Shertok’s No Rhododendron.
“So much of what the prize aims to recognize and honor is represented in the talented work of poet Stephanie Niu,” Jackson said. “Contemplative and boldly expressive, Niu addresses profound questions of dwindling ecologies, desire, cultural identity and class realities. In so doing, we encounter an audacious voice who thinks by feeling. These are stark lyric poems of immense reach and perceptiveness.”
For further inquiries or information about the prize, visit vanderbilt.edu/vuliteraryprize or email VU Literary Administrator Patrick Samuel at vuliteraryprize@vanderbilt.edu.
