English Professor Monica Pelaez this spring published an anthology of abolitionist poetry.
“Lyrical Liberators: The American Anti-Slavery Movement in Verse, 1831-1865” is the first collection of abolitionist poems in book form.
Abolitionist poems were a large and visible part of the abolitionist movement. Pelaez spent years of archival research recovering them from newspapers, magazines and other places where they originally appeared.
The poems are arranged by theme through 13 chapters, a number that represents the amendment that finally abolished slavery in 1865. The book collects and annotates works by critically acclaimed writers, commercially successful scribes and minority voices, including those of African Americans and women.
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian James M. McPherson said of the book, “The abolitionist movement made powerful appeals to the hearts and minds of auditors and readers in their efforts to convert them to the cause of emancipation. But as the poems in this splendid anthology prove, the medium of poetry was most effective in creating an emotional empathy with the slaves and their yearnings for freedom.”
Pelaez is an associate professor of English. She holds a degree from Princeton and her doctorate from Brown University. Her research focuses on 19th century American poetry and literature. She has published essays on Emily Dickinson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Edgar Allan Poe.
