Hanif Abdurraqib | There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension @AuthorEvents
Hanif Abdurraqib | There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension  @AuthorEvents
Uploaded March 2024 | Updated September 2026, 2 days ago
Because you love Author Events, please make a donation to keep this series available to everyone: support.freelibrary.org/site/Donation2?df_id=1860&mfc_pref=T&1860.donation=form1

In conversation with Airea Dee Matthews

Hanif Abdurraqib is the author of A Little Devil in America, a sweeping look at Black music, art, and culture that won the Carnegie Medal and the Gordon Burns Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award. His other works include the essay collection They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, which was named a best book of 2017 by Esquire, the Chicago Tribune, and NPR, among other outlets; Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest, a New York Times bestseller and a National Book Critics Circle Award and Kirkus Prize finalist; and the poetry collection A Fortune for Your Disaster, winner of the 2020 Lenore Marshall Prize. His other essays, poems, and criticism have been published in a wide array of media. In There’s Always This Year, Abdurraqib offers an emotional and historical meditation on basketball—who makes it, who we think should be successful in the game, and the very notion of role models.

Airea D. Matthews is the 2022–23 Philadelphia Poet Laureate and directs the poetry program at Bryn Mawr College. Her collection Simulcra won the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize and her work has appeared in The New York Times, Best American Poets, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, and VQR, among other journals. Matthews’ other honors include a 2022 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship, a 2020 Pew Fellowship, and the 2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Her latest work, Bread and Circus, addresses themes of income inequality, commodification, and conventional economic theories through poetry, prose, and imagery.

Recorded March 27, 2024

Facebook: facebook.com/authorevents
Instagram: instagram.com/flpauthorevents
Twitter: twitter.com/authorevents
Podcast Archive: libwww.freelibrary.org/programs/authorevents/podcast

The views expressed by the authors and moderators are strictly their own and do not represent the opinions of the Free Library of Philadelphia or its employees.
Hanif Abdurraqib | There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and AscensionDrew Gilpin Faust | Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at MidcenturyBrian Kelly | How To Win At TravelSafiya Sinclair | How to Say Babylon: A MemoirAnnette Gordon-Reed | Jefferson on Race: A ReaderPaul Muldoon | Joy in Service on Rue Tagore: PoemsJonathan Capehart | Yet Here I Am: Lessons from a Black Mans Search for HomeM. Nzadi Keita | Migration Letters: PoemsHamilton Nolan | The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of LaborMalcolm Jenkins | What Winners Wont Tell You: Lessons from a Legendary DefenderSteven Pinker | When Everyone Knows That Everyone KnowsAirea D. Matthews | Bread and Circus
Author Events |

Hanif Abdurraqib | There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

SHARE TO X SHARE TO REDDIT SHARE TO FACEBOOK WALLPAPER