Cost: $40 ticket with book

Tickets will be for sale at the will-call table in the lobby after 6:45 p.m.

In conversation with Airea Dee Matthews

The author requests attendees wear masks at the event. 
Masks are required to join the book signing line.

Hanif Abdurraqib is the author of A Little Devil in America, a sweeping look at Black music, art, and culture that won the Carnegie Medal and the Gordon Burns Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award. His other works include the essay collection They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, which was named a best book of 2017 by Esquire, the Chicago Tribune, and NPR, among other outlets; Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest, a New York Times bestseller and a National Book Critics Circle Award and Kirkus Prize finalist; and the poetry collection A Fortune for Your Disaster, winner of the 2020 Lenore Marshall Prize. His other essays, poems, and criticism have been published in a wide array of media. In There’s Always This Year, Abdurraqib offers an emotional and historical meditation on basketball—who makes it, who we think should be successful in the game, and the very notion of role models.

Airea D. Matthews is the 2022–23 Philadelphia Poet Laureate and directs the poetry program at Bryn Mawr College. Her collection Simulcra won the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize and her work has appeared in The New York Times, Best American Poets, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, and VQR, among other journals. Matthews’ other honors include a 2022 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship, a 2020 Pew Fellowship, and the 2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Her latest work, Bread and Circus, addresses themes of income inequality, commodification, and conventional economic theories through poetry, prose, and imagery. The book was nominated for an LA Times Poetry Book Prize.

Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians.

Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night
A book signing will follow the presentation. You must wear a mask to have your book signed.
Collect your book as you enter the auditorium
Books provided by Uncle Bobbie's Coffee and Books
Ticket price includes processing fees
US orders only