Hanif Abdurraqib witnessed a golden era of basketball growing up in Columbus, Ohio, one which inspired the writing in his memoir, There’s Always This Year—a triumph, which is brimming with joy, pain, solidarity, comfort, outrage, and hope. No matter the subject of his keen focus—whether it’s basketball, or music, or performance—Hanif Abdurraqib’s exquisite writing is always poetry, always profound, and always a clarion call to radically reimagine how we think about our culture, our country, and ourselves.
Q&A with Robert Lashley.
Growing up in Columbus, Ohio, in the 1990s, Hanif Abdurraqib witnessed a golden era of basketball, one in which legends like LeBron James were forged and countless others weren’t. His lifelong love of the game leads Abdurraqib into a lyrical, historical, and emotionally rich exploration of what it means to make it, who we think deserves success, the tension between excellence and expectation, and the very notion of role models, all of which he expertly weaves together with intimate, personal storytelling. “Here is where I would like to tell you about the form on my father’s jump shot,” Abdurraqib writes. “The truth, though, is that I saw my father shoot a basketball only one time.”
Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. He is also a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” grant. Abdurraqib’s recent book, A Little Devil in America, was the winner of the Carnegie Medal and the Gordon Burns Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award. His first full-length poetry collection, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award and was nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award.
Hanif’s first collection of essays, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us was named a book of the year by NPR, Esquire, BuzzFeed, O: The Oprah Magazine, Pitchfork, and Chicago Tribune, among others. Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest was a New York Times bestseller and a National Book Critics Circle Award and Kirkus Prize finalist and was long-listed for the National Book Award. His second collection of poems, A Fortune for Your Disaster, won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. He is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.
Robert Lashley was a 2016 Jack Straw Fellow, Artist Trust Fellow and a nominee for a Stranger Genius Award. His books include Green River Valley (Blue Cactus Press, 2021), Up South (Small Doggies Press, 2017) and The Homeboy Songs (Small Doggies Press, 2014). His poetry has appeared in The Seattle Review of Books, NAILED, Poetry Northwest, McSweeney’s and The Cascadia Review and recently, The Cascadia Field Guide. In 2019, Entropy Magazine named The Homeboy Songs one of the 25 essential books to come out of Seattle. His novel, I Never Dreamed You’d Leave In Summer, was selected as a finalist for a Washington State Book Award in 2024 and this year was selected as one of bookshop.com’s 30 favorite Black books in the last 10 years. He lives in Bellingham.
