Hanif Abdurraqib in conversation with Marcus Wicker

presented by Butler MFA

Hanif Abdurraqib is an award-winning poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His newest release, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension (Random House, 2024) was a New York Times Bestseller and longlisted for the National Book Award in nonfiction. His previous book, A Little Devil In America (Random House, 2021) was a winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal and the Gordon Burn Prize. In 2021, Abdurraqib was named a MacArthur Fellow, and in 2024 was named a Windham-Campbell Prize recipient. He is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.

Marcus Wicker was born in Ann Arbor and raised in Ypsilanti, Michigan. He is the author of three books of poetry: DEAR MOTHERSHIP (Ecco, 2026), Silencer (Mariner/Ecco, 2017) — winner of the Society of Midland Authors Award — and Maybe the Saddest Thing (Harper Perennial, 2012), selected by D.A. Powell for the National Poetry Series. A 2023-2024 Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellow, his honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, the Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poetry Award, a Pushcart Prize, and Ruth Lilly Fellowship, as well as fellowships from The Fine Arts Work Center, and Cave Canem. Wicker’s poems have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The Atlantic, Oxford American, and Poetry Magazine. He is a Professor and the Orgill Chair of English at the University of Memphis, where he teaches in the MFA program.