Hanif Abdurraqib

Background

Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib was born on November 4, 1983, in Columbus, Ohio, United States.

Education

Hanif Abdurraqib studied at Beechcroft High School. He played there on a soccer team. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English at Capital University in 2005.

Career

Hanif Abdurraqib's poetry has been published in Muzzle, Vinyl, PEN American, and various other journals. His essays and music criticism have been published in The FADER, Pitchfork, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. Hanif Abdurraqib is also a former MTV News columnist who wrote about music, culture, and identity. In August 2017, he became the managing editor of Button Poetry. He was a visiting poet teaching in the MFA program at Butler University in the fall of 2018, a Callaloo Creative Writing Fellow, and an interviewer at Union Station Magazine. He edited an anthology of poems about pop music called Again I Wait For This To Pull Apart.

Abdurraqib's first published book was full-length poetry collection The Crown Ain't Worth Much (2016). Abdurraqib’s preferred form in this collection is poems made of big blocks of stream-of-consciousness text. The subject matter - gang-bangers, kids on the block, house parties, and all kinds of Americana including the Chicago Bulls, Whitney Houston, and A Tribe Called Quest locates the collection firmly in its time and place: a milieu of 1990s kitsch and police brutality. The first half of the book mainly deals with the poet’s childhood and youth. There’s enough trauma here to fuel a thousand poems, and Willis-Abdurraqib turns it into art. The second half, while no less vital, sees the “I” character mature into adulthood; a wife is referenced several times, and the high jinks of youth have dissipated into memory.

His first collection of essays They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us was released in winter 2017. There are essays about his family, his childhood, friends, his neighborhood, about Serena Williams, Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Nina Simone. Each one is about death, about lore, but also, in its own way, about hope and finding moments of joy and grace in a country that is armed against black people. With Big Lucks, Abdurraqib released a limited edition chapbook, Vintage Sadness, in summer 2017. He is also a member of the poetry collective Echo Hotel with poet and essayist Eve Ewing.

The second collection of poems A Fortune For Your Disaster was released in 2019. It's a book about how one rebuilds oneself after a heartbreak, the kind that renders them a different version of themselves than the one they knew. It’s a book about a mother’s death, and admitting that Michael Jordan pushed off, about forgiveness, and how none of the author’s black friends wanted to listen to “Don’t Stop Believin’.” It’s about wrestling with histories, personal and shared. That same year Abdurraqib published Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest. It's at once an extended critical essay, a hip-hop history, and a series of love letters to the band A Tribe Called Quest, and particularly to the group's two-star MCs, Q-Tip and Phife Dawg. His forthcoming book is They Don't Dance No' Mo' (2021).

Achievements

• Abdurraqib's book The Crown Ain't Worth Much was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize and was nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us was named a book of the year by Buzzfeed, Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, Paste, CBC, The Los Angeles Review, Pitchfork, and The Chicago Tribune, among others. The Chicago Tribune named They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us to a list of "25 must-read books" for the fall of 2017. The book Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest became a New York Times Bestseller, and was met with critical acclaim.
  
  Blavity called Abdurraqib one of "13 Young Black Poets You Should Know". In April 2017 his chapbook Vintage Sadness had a limited edition, selling out its print run of 500 copies in just under six hours.
  
  

Works

More photos

• book

  • A Fortune for Your Disaster

    (In this follow-up to The Crown Ain't Worth Much, Hanif Ab...)

    2019
  • Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest

    (Abdurraqib traces the Tribe's creative career, from their...)

    2019
  • They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

    (In the wake of the nightclub attacks in Paris, he recalls...)

    2017
  • The Crown Ain't Worth Much

    (The Crown Ain't Worth Much, Hanif Abdurraqib's first full...)

    2016

Views

Hanif Abdurraqib's desire to write stemmed from a type of curiosity about the world and about himself. He likes focusing on the minutiae of the lived experience because the grander aspects of it are so often terrible and overwhelming.

His literary influences are Lester Bangs, Pete Wentz, Zora Neale Hurston, Josephine Baker, Octavia Butler, and Eve Ewing.

Quotations: "And what good is making grand, sweeping work facing the masses if you can’t face yourself?"

"I’m afraid of what I’d lose if I didn’t write things down."

"I think grief is work, in the same way, that I think speaking about joy and trying to find joy is work."

"I don’t want to talk about death all the time, I don’t want to revel in death."

"I found this joy about understanding that I have limited time here, and I’m lucky that I have people who would miss me if I were not here anymore."

"I am trying to be better at loving and living and fighting for the things I believe in while I’m still present."

"The thing about existing joyfully in this way during your youth is that you can convince yourself that racism isn’t a palpable, or touchable thing."

"I want you to see me for who I am. I want us to appreciate each other for who we are."

Personality

Hanif Abdurraqib really enjoys engaging in discussion with people who read his work and have immediate questions about it.

He likes sneakers and music.

Quotes from others about the person

• "Hanif Abdurraqib is everyone's favorite poet right now." - William Evans
  
  "I think Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib is one of the best poets writing today."

Interests

• music