New Hanif Abdurraqib Book, ‘There's Always This Year,’ Uses Basketball to Uncover Emotions

On a cold night in mid-January, fans begin to fill the bleachers inside Beechcroft High School’s brown-and-gold gym for the home basketball team’s matchup with nearby rival Northland High School. Writer Hanif Abdurraqib, a 2001 Beechcroft grad, watches the JV game in the balcony area, a long, black overcoat with blue, embroidered flowers covering his white hoodie. Though he grew up on the East Side, this is the place where Abdurraqib once played Mercutio in “Romeo and Juliet,” the fields where he led the Cougars’ soccer team, the court where he ran point. 

Before varsity tipoff, Abdurraqib warmly greets Northland basketball coach and former on-court foe Tihon Johnson, a fellow 2001 Columbus City Schools grad who played point guard at Centennial and East high schools. Other figures from Abdurraqib’s past also appear, like former classmate Walter Dudley, now Beechcroft’s athletic director, and assistant Beechcroft coach Raylon Almon, another baller who graduated a few years behind Abdurraqib. CCS may be the biggest district in the state, but City League basketball is a contained world with a storied history and a traceable lineage. The rivalries are generational. 

Northland is favored tonight, in no small part because of King Kendrick, a sophomore point guard whose ambidextrous shooting skills have elicited social media comments from NBA stars like Kyrie Irving and Isaiah Thomas. Kendrick is still young, but the hype is similar to bygone buzz around local basketball heroes from Abdurraqib’s youth—guys like Michael Redd (West), Estaban Weaver (Bishop Hartley/Independence) and Kenny Gregory (Independence), who lived about five houses down from Abdurraqib.  

“We would get the sports section on Saturday mornings and see [Gregory] sometimes on the front page and run down the street and knock on the door,” Abdurraqib says. “We felt a part of Kenny’s success, because we would rebound for him at the park. We would watch him play at Scottwood [Elementary].” 

“There is something about witnessing greatness before the rest of the world fully arrives to it,” Abdurraqib writes in his new book, “There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension,” out March 26—the day after he kicks off a national book tour with a Two Dollar Radio event at the King Arts Complex. The book is Abdurraqib’s most confident yet vulnerable work to date, written in prose that spontaneously explodes into poetry the way some preachers can’t help but break into song mid-sermon.  

It’s a book about basketball, sure, but more so it’s about devotion, place and mortality. Basketball is merely the vehicle for those explorations. Just like 2019’s “Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest” didn’t require familiarity with the legendary rap group, basketball fandom isn’t a prerequisite for enjoying “There’s Always This Year.” 

“I never care about what someone's starting point of affection is,” Abdurraqib says. “I'm not the most confident in all my skills, but I know I can write something that can make you feel like you've loved it your whole life.” 

For years, Abdurraqib wanted to write this book, but before all the accolades—a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” grant; the Carnegie Medal and National Book Award shortlist for 2021 book “A Little Devil in America”; countless rave reviews—he couldn’t sell anyone on it. Admittedly, he also didn’t know how to explain it. “When I tell people I want to write a basketball book because I came up in the era of LeBron James, the light bulb in their head is like, ‘LeBron James biography.’ No, no. I'm not interested in that,” he says. “But I also can't be like, ‘I want to write a book about how I was fairly certain I was not going to survive past 25 years old, and now I have.’ ” 

In the years since local publisher Two Dollar Radio issued his 2017 breakthrough essay collection, “They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us,” Abdurraqib’s books have tugged at threads of his inner life to reveal core emotional truths. But in “There’s Always This Year,” he goes even further, excavating parts of his biography he’d only touched on previously. 

“I sat down to write this book and asked myself, on some very real levels, ‘What have I been afraid to approach and why?’ ” says Abdurraqib, who cast off those fears by embracing his 40 years of unexpected survival. He then realized, for one, that while much of his writing is framed around his mother, who died when Abdurraqib was 13, he had not credited his father enough for triumphing over grief. He’d also previously avoided writing in-depth about his time incarcerated in Franklin County and his experience navigating Columbus unhoused after getting evicted. 

In those days, Abdurraqib would often make his way to the Columbus Metropolitan Library Main branch—a place where he could rest without feeling like a burden. But because of that uniquely brutal time in his life, Abdurraqib’s aversion to the library persisted until this book, most of which he wrote at the Downtown location to reformat his relationship to the space. 

Back at the Beechcroft gym, Northland wins easily. King Kendrick started slowly but ended up with a quiet 21 points, often ceding the spotlight to his teammates. Abdurraqib, too, is aware of the bright light shining on him. And it’s not just the plaudits; perhaps you’ve seen his face on the East Main Street “People’s Mural of Columbus.” “It's strange to be hyper-visible in a city you were once invisible in,” he says.  

Literary prestige isn’t the goal, though. “If I am only remembered here ... as someone who wrote books that people like, that's kind of a failure,” Abdurraqib says. “I want to be remembered as a full person, because the vast majority of my life in Columbus has been spent as someone who did not write things. ... An achievement for me is making this a city that everyone is at least capable of loving the way I do.” 

This story is from the March 2024 issue of Columbus Monthly.