Lyrical Liberators: The American Antislavery Movement in Verse, 1831-1865

During the American antebellum period, antislavery activists used free speech to take on the institution of slavery. Monica Pelaez ’97, an associate professor of English at St. Cloud State University, collects antislavery poems in her new book, Lyrical Liberators (Ohio University Press). Pelaez sources poems from William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator to Frederick Douglass’s North Star, finding works that reflect how the abolition movement rallied the public through literary voices. Lyrical Liberators is the first comprehensive collection of American antislavery poems. The book covers the period between the Liberator’s inaugural issue in 1831 to the abolishment of slavery in 1865.