Hanif Abdurraqib

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Andrew Cenci

A close-up of Hanif Abdurraqib.

Hanif Abdurraqib

Essayist and poet Hanif Abdurraqib’s last book, 2021’s A Little Devil In America, was a National Book Award finalist and bestseller. In his latest, Abdurraqib again casts a keen eye on American culture, this time with a focus on basketball and his native Ohio. There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension of course features fellow Ohioan LeBron James, but is about much more than James or basketball; NPR’s Michael Schaub calls it “a piercing look at how we consider others, as well as ourselves.” Abdurraqib will discuss the book in a free talk hosted by A Room of One's Own.

media release: A Room of One's Own is thrilled to welcome award winning author and cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib for an evening on his newest book There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension. Join us for an unforgettable conversation.

This is an in person event at The Goodman Community Center Bea & Lau Christensen Rooms in the Brassworks Building.

This is not a ticketed event, all you have to do is come! Seats are first come, first serve.

About the Book

A poignant, personal reflection on basketball, talent and allegiance, and of course, LeBron James—from the author of the National Book Award finalist A Little Devil in America

While Hanif Abdurraqib is an acclaimed author, a gifted poet, and one of our culture’s most insightful critics, he is most of all, at heart, an Ohioan. Growing up in Columbus in the 1990s, Abdurraqib witnessed a golden era of basketball, one in which legends like LeBron 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 tensions between excellence and expectation, and the very notion of role models, all of which he expertly weaves together with memoir. “Here is where I would like to tell you about the form on my father’s jumpshot,” Abdurraqib writes. “The truth, though, is that I saw my father shoot a basketball only one time.”

There’s Always This Year is a classic Abdurraqib triumph, brimming with joy, pain, solidarity, comfort, outrage, and hope. It’s about basketball in the way They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us is about music and A Little Devil in America is about history—no matter the subject, 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.

Hanif Abdurraqib is an award-winning poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His newest release, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension (Random House, 2024) is a New York Times Bestseller. His previous book, A Little Devil In America (Random House, 2021) was a winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal and the Gordon Burn Prize. In 2021, Abdurraqib was named a MacArthur Fellow, and in 2024 was named a Windham-Campbell Prize recipient. He is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.