Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His poetry has been published in journals including Muzzle, Vinyl and PEN American. His essays and music criticism have been published in The FADER, Pitchfork, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. 

Abdurraqib’s first full length poetry collection, 2016’s The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, was nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. His first collection of essays, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was named a book of the year for 2017 by Buzzfeed, Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, Paste, CBC, The Los Angeles Review, Pitchfork, and The Chicago Tribune. He released Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest with University of Texas Press in February 2019, which became a New York Times Bestseller and a finalist for the Kirkus Prize.

His second collection of poems, A Fortune For Your Disaster, was released in 2019 by Tin House and won the 2020 Lenore Marshall Prize. In 2021, he released the book A Little Devil In America with Random House. Placing as a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the The PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, it also won the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the Gordon Burn Prize.

His most recent book is There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension (Random House, 2024), a New York Times Bestseller and longlisted for the National Book Award in nonfiction. A 2021 MacArthur Fellow, Abdurraqib was also named a Windham-Campbell Prize recipient in 2024.

Join us this September to experience this public lecture from Hanif Abdurraqib in the Luth Concert Hall at The Prior.