A short life of the author
Hanif Abdurraqib (b. 1988, Columbus, Ohio) is an American poet, essayist, and cultural critic who has done something that seemed impossible: he has made music criticism a major literary form. His essays — about Fall Out Boy and Carly Rae Jepsen, about A Tribe Called Quest and the death of Tamir Rice, about Beyoncé and minstrelsy and the particular loneliness of being Black in the Midwest — are not reviews or profiles but acts of criticism so personal, so emotionally charged, and so formally inventive that they constitute a new kind of American prose.
Life and Career
Abdurraqib was born and raised in Columbus, Ohio — a city he has never fully left and that anchors his work with a specificity that distinguishes him from coastal critics. Columbus is not New York or Los Angeles; it is a mid-sized Midwestern city where Black and white cultures overlap in particular ways, where punk scenes and hip-hop scenes share parking lots, and where the death of a Black child at the hands of police is not an abstraction but something that happens to people you know.
He came to writing through slam poetry, performing in Columbus’s spoken-word scene before publishing his first poetry collection, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much (2016). But it was his essay collection They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us (2017) — published by the independent press Two Dollar Radio — that transformed him from a local poet into a national literary figure.
They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us (2017)
The collection’s title — taken from a line about Black resilience — announces its method: every essay uses a piece of music or a cultural event as a lens through which to examine what it means to be Black in America. An essay about Fall Out Boy becomes a meditation on the racial dynamics of emo subculture. An essay about Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” becomes a study of joy as a form of resistance. An essay about attending a Bruce Springsteen concert becomes a reckoning with whiteness, class, and the American working-class mythologies that Springsteen both embodies and obscures.
What makes the essays work is Abdurraqib’s refusal to separate the critical from the personal. He writes about music the way he writes about grief, friendship, and his city — with a directness and emotional vulnerability that makes the reader feel the stakes of every argument. These are not think pieces; they are acts of witness.
Go Ahead in the Rain (2019)
Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest is a hybrid of music criticism, memoir, and cultural history. Structured as a series of letters to the members of A Tribe Called Quest, the book traces the group’s trajectory from the Native Tongues movement through the golden age of hip-hop to their reunion and final album after the death of Phife Dawg. It is also, inevitably, a meditation on Black male friendship, on ageing, on loss, and on what it means when the art that shaped your youth outlives the people who made it.
A Little Devil in America (2021)
A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance is his most ambitious work — a book about Black performance in America from minstrelsy to Beyoncé, from Josephine Baker to Whitney Houston, from the Soul Train line to the Black church. The book’s argument is that Black performance — singing, dancing, preaching, playing, being seen — is both a site of liberation and a site of exploitation, and that the line between performance and survival has never been clear for Black Americans.
The book is formally adventurous: chapters range from personal essays to critical analyses to prose poems to list-form meditations. A chapter on Josephine Baker doubles as a meditation on exile. A chapter on the Soul Train line becomes a study of communal joy. A chapter on Whitney Houston’s death becomes an elegy for the destruction that fame visits on Black bodies.
A Little Devil in America was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Gordon Burn Prize. It cemented Abdurraqib’s reputation as the most important American essayist of his generation.
Themes and Critical Standing
Abdurraqib’s method is to begin with the particular — a specific song, a specific concert, a specific death — and to build outward until the particular becomes an argument about race, place, loss, and the conditions under which Black art is made and consumed. His criticism is always personal (he writes about his own grief, his own city, his own memories) and always political (he writes about police violence, structural racism, and the economics of cultural appropriation).
He has been compared to James Baldwin (for the fusion of the personal and the political), to Greil Marcus (for the seriousness of music criticism), and to Hilton Als (for the formal inventiveness). He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship — the “genius grant” — in recognition of his contribution to American letters.
Key Works
- They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us (2017)
- Go Ahead in the Rain (2019)
- A Little Devil in America (2021) — National Book Award finalist, Gordon Burn Prize
Collecting Abdurraqib
They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us (Two Dollar Radio, 2017) first edition brings $30–$80 — the small-press first printing is scarce and increasingly sought. Go Ahead in the Rain (University of Texas Press, 2019) first edition brings $20–$40. A Little Devil in America (Random House, 2021) first edition brings $15–$30. Early poetry chapbooks and broadsides from his Columbus slam days are rare and of growing interest. Abdurraqib signs at literary festivals and bookshop events.