15 Facts About Hanif Abdurraqib

Hanif Abdurraqib is an American poet, essayist, and cultural critic.

When Hanif Abdurraqib was aged 13, his mother died from an abnormal heartbeat caused by her bipolar medicine.

Hanif Abdurraqib then attended Capital University, where he earned a degree in marketing and played on the soccer team.

Hanif Abdurraqib is a Pushcart Prize nominee and a Callaloo Creative Writing Fellow.

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poetry editor at Muzzle Magazine and a founder, with Eve Ewing, of the Echo Hotel poetry collective.

Hanif Abdurraqib edited an anthology of poems about pop music called Again I Wait For This To Pull Apart.

Hanif Abdurraqib was a visiting poet teaching in the MFA program at Butler University during the fall of 2018.

Hanif Abdurraqib's writing has appeared in The Fader, The New York Times, and Pitchfork, as well as previously serving as a columnist at MTV News, writing about music, culture, and identity.

Hanif Abdurraqib published Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest in 2019 as part of University of Texas Press's American Music Series, edited by Jessica Hopper, David Menconi, and Oliver Wang.

In January 2018, Hanif Abdurraqib announced he had signed a two-book deal with Random House; announced as a nonfiction book They Don't Dance No' Mo' on the history of black performance in the United States, to be published in 2020 and an essay collection following up on They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us.

In 2021, Hanif Abdurraqib launched a weekly podcast called "Object of Sound" with Sonos Radio.

Hanif Abdurraqib created a miniseries called "Time Machine: The Score" for the podcast The 11th.

In 2017, Hanif Abdurraqib received an honorary degree in human ecology from the College of the Atlantic.

Hanif Abdurraqib was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2021 and a Windham-Campbell Prize in 2024.

Hanif Abdurraqib married a woman in 2014 and moved with her to New Haven, Connecticut, where she worked as a teacher.