Hanif Abdurraqib
Author of They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us
About the Author
Works by Hanif Abdurraqib
Respect the Mic: Celebrating 20 Years of Poetry from a Chicagoland High School (2022) — Editor — 24 copies, 1 review
Associated Works
African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song (2020) — Contributor — 190 copies, 4 reviews
Bodies Built for Game: The Prairie Schooner Anthology of Contemporary Sports Writing (2019) — Contributor — 6 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1983
- Gender
- male
- Nationality
- USA
- Places of residence
- Columbus, Ohio, USA
- Education
- Beechcroft High School, Columbus, Ohio, USA
- Occupations
- poet
essayist
cultural critic - Awards and honors
- MacArthur Fellowship (2021)
Windham Campbell Award (Nonfiction, 2024)
Members
Reviews
There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib
A rich, thoughtful book about sports, love, community, loss, humanity, and more.
Wow, just wow. The writing is so beautiful and mesmerizing. I listened to the audiobook on narrated by the author. He reads it as poetry. He is a very talented author and such a sensitive, perceptive, vulnerable soul.
I loved the original structure of the book - his essays are arranged in quarters with timeouts and intermissions as a basketball game. I loved basketball when I was a kid and a teen. I remember the thrill of long streetball sessions. The book was quite a rabbit hole because I had to google many things, I listened to songs he talks about, watched the commercials, game videos and I even watched the documentary The Fab Five.
I'm not from Ohio, but Latvia and Georgia are kind of similar. I know how it feels to cheer for the underdog. I started listening to it just before the Georgia's historic victory over Portugal in UEFA European Championship and I still remember the emotions from last year when Latvia got the bronze in the IIHF World Championship and the 5th place in the FIBA Basketball World Cup. The Olympic gold game in Men's 3x3 basketball in 2020... I was also sitting on the floor crying. The sports have a great power to inspire and unite communities, cities, states and countries.
Besides basketball, it's a memoir of Hanif Abdurraqib's life, growing up black and poor in Columbus, Ohio, watching planes in Columbus airport with his dad, getting arrested for petty crime, being evicted, grieving the premature deaths of his mother and his friends, heartbreak in many ways, success being measured in "getting out" of Ohio when all you want is to stay.
He is not only a basketball fan, he is also a music fan. I started to follow Hanif on Spotify. He has immense knowledge of music. I really don't know he'd had time to listen to it all. It seems it's also a big part of his career - he used to work in a book store selling records and it seems he has been writing a lot of album reviews. I'm sure they are fantastic. Everything he writes is amazing and he has a great taste in music.
One of the best books I've read in 2024.… (more)
I loved the original structure of the book - his essays are arranged in quarters with timeouts and intermissions as a basketball game. I loved basketball when I was a kid and a teen. I remember the thrill of long streetball sessions. The book was quite a rabbit hole because I had to google many things, I listened to songs he talks about, watched the commercials, game videos and I even watched the documentary The Fab Five.
I'm not from Ohio, but Latvia and Georgia are kind of similar. I know how it feels to cheer for the underdog. I started listening to it just before the Georgia's historic victory over Portugal in UEFA European Championship and I still remember the emotions from last year when Latvia got the bronze in the IIHF World Championship and the 5th place in the FIBA Basketball World Cup. The Olympic gold game in Men's 3x3 basketball in 2020... I was also sitting on the floor crying. The sports have a great power to inspire and unite communities, cities, states and countries.
Besides basketball, it's a memoir of Hanif Abdurraqib's life, growing up black and poor in Columbus, Ohio, watching planes in Columbus airport with his dad, getting arrested for petty crime, being evicted, grieving the premature deaths of his mother and his friends, heartbreak in many ways, success being measured in "getting out" of Ohio when all you want is to stay.
He is not only a basketball fan, he is also a music fan. I started to follow Hanif on Spotify. He has immense knowledge of music. I really don't know he'd had time to listen to it all. It seems it's also a big part of his career - he used to work in a book store selling records and it seems he has been writing a lot of album reviews. I'm sure they are fantastic. Everything he writes is amazing and he has a great taste in music.
One of the best books I've read in 2024.… (more)
Hanif Abdurraqib writes prose like a poet, with a sense of sound and rhythm, his language both loose and precise. The performance referred to in his subtitle encompasses not only song and dance on stage, in juke-joint basements and church, but performance as survival, as going home, as misdirection and dissimulation, a way of turning the absurdity of black experience inside out.
Abdurraqib’s essays in A Little Devil in America combine a wide-ranging consideration of popular culture with an acute historical awareness. He writes of how the Harlem Hellfighters and jazz musicians arrived in France at the same time, about the rivalry of Joe Tex and James Brown and the audience at the Apollo Theatre, about how Don Shirley abandoned a musical career for a psychology practice in Chicago then combined the two in a nightclub study of how piano music affected the behavior of at-risk juveniles.
In a chapter called “Nine Considerations of Black People in Space,” Abdurraqib writes of Octavia Butler’s science fiction speaking to people who have long survived by learning to adapt until something better comes along, and of his fascination with Sun Ra’s claim to knowledge of another world and the performance that he wrought from it.
What I loved was that none of it seemed outlandish. It didn’t seem like a particularly excruciating performance, nor did it seem like the ramblings of someone suffering from some mental detachment. It all seemed very measured, calm, matter of fact. Sun Ra was from somewhere else and he’d seen things none of us could fathom, and yet here he was, sharing what he had to give with us anyway.… (more)
Abdurraqib’s essays in A Little Devil in America combine a wide-ranging consideration of popular culture with an acute historical awareness. He writes of how the Harlem Hellfighters and jazz musicians arrived in France at the same time, about the rivalry of Joe Tex and James Brown and the audience at the Apollo Theatre, about how Don Shirley abandoned a musical career for a psychology practice in Chicago then combined the two in a nightclub study of how piano music affected the behavior of at-risk juveniles.
In a chapter called “Nine Considerations of Black People in Space,” Abdurraqib writes of Octavia Butler’s science fiction speaking to people who have long survived by learning to adapt until something better comes along, and of his fascination with Sun Ra’s claim to knowledge of another world and the performance that he wrought from it.
What I loved was that none of it seemed outlandish. It didn’t seem like a particularly excruciating performance, nor did it seem like the ramblings of someone suffering from some mental detachment. It all seemed very measured, calm, matter of fact. Sun Ra was from somewhere else and he’d seen things none of us could fathom, and yet here he was, sharing what he had to give with us anyway.… (more)
1 
HectorSwell | 14 other reviews | Jun 17, 2024 |
HectorSwell | 14 other reviews | Jun 17, 2024 | 
The writing here is phenomenal, so despite focusing on a topic I don't have a lot of thoughts on (music/music culture) I ate this up. This approaches the topics from the viewpoint of a Black man who is intimately connected to and influenced by the music worlds he exists in. The audio is read by the author and he has conversational interstitials amidst the essays with background information. I loved this, tho I imagine someone who feels strongly on the music covered here may have more to say.
Lists
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Music (1)
Awards
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Statistics
- Works
- 12
- Also by
- 8
- Members
- 1,685
- Popularity
- #15,261
- Rating
- 4.4
- Reviews
- 43
- ISBNs
- 53
- Languages
- 1
- Favorited
- 3