Hanif Abdurraqib
New York Times bestselling poet, essayist, and cultural critic
Ross Gay, Ph.D.
Award-winning New York Times bestselling author
There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension
BONUS BOOK GIVEAWAY! We are giving away copies of There’s Always This Year to randomly selected Zoom attendees. Details on the webinar registration page.
There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension is award-winning poet, essayist, and cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib’s poignant, personal reflection on basketball, talent, and allegiance, and of course, LeBron James. Growing up in Columbus, Ohio 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 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.”
There’s Always This Year is a triumph, brimming with joy, pain, solidarity, comfort, outrage, and hope. No matter the subject of his keen focus – whether it’s basketball, music, or performance — 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.
Abdurraqib (FAN ’21) will be in conversation with Ross Gay, Ph.D. (FAN ’23), the New York Times bestselling author of the essay collections The Book of (More) Delights, The Book of Delights, and Inciting Joy and four books of poetry. His Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award; and Be Holding won the 2021 PEN America Jean Stein Book Award.
This event suitable for youth 12+. It will be recorded and available on FAN’s website and YouTube channel.
Event Sponsors
- The Avery Coonley School
- Baker Demonstration School
- Bernard Zell Anshe Emet Day School
- Brickton Montessori School
- British International School of Chicago
- Catherine Cook School
- Chicago Jewish Day School
- Compass Health Center
- Evanston Township High School D202
- Family Service Center
- Foundation 65
- The Frances Xavier Warde School
- Francis W. Parker School
- Gorton Center
- Grayslake Community High School D127
- Haven Youth and Family Services
- Hyde Park Day School
- Illinois Student Assistance Commission
- Kenilworth D38
- Lake Forest Academy
- Lake Forest Country Day School
- Lake Michigan Association of Independent Schools
- Latin School of Chicago
- Leo Catholic High School
- Loyola Academy
- Lycée Français de Chicago
- Mindful Psychology Associates PC
- Morgan Park Academy
- New Trier High School D203
- New Trier Parents’ Association
- North Shore Country Day
- Northwestern University Office of Neighborhood and Community Relations
- Northwestern University School of Education and Social Policy
- Pope John XXIII School
- Rebel Human
- Regina Dominican College Preparatory High School
- Resurrection College Prep High School
- Rogers Park Montessori School
- Roycemore School
- St. Bernard’s School
- Santa Clara University School of Law
- Science & Arts Academy
- Stevenson High School D125
- Winnetka-Northfield Public Library District
- Wolcott College Prep
- Woodlands Academy of the Sacred Heart
- Youth & Opportunity United (Y.O.U.)
Upcoming Events
How to Start: Discovering Your Life’s Work
Jodi Kantor
Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times investigative reporter
Jennifer Breheny Wallace
Award-winning journalist and bestselling author
ON ZOOM
Backtalker: An American Memoir
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw
Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles, the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, and the cofounder and Executive Director of the African American Policy Forum
Beth E. Richie, Ph.D.
Distinguished Professor of Criminology, Law, and Justice and Black Studies and the Inaugural Chair in Social Sciences and the Humanities at The University of Illinois at Chicago
Evanston Township High School Auditorium
Note: Event start time is Central Time (CT).
NO REGISTRATION REQUIRED.
America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries
Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Ph.D.
James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of African American Studies, Princeton University
Imani Perry, JD, Ph.D.
Henry A. Morss, Jr. and Elisabeth W. Morss Professor of Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University and the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute
ON ZOOM
