"There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension" is award-winning poet, essayist, and cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib’s poignant, personal reflection on basketball, talent, and allegiance, and of course, LeBron James. Growing up in Columbus, Ohio in the 1990s, Abdurraqib witnessed a golden era of basketball, one in which legends like LeBron were forged, and countless others weren’t. His lifelong love of the game leads Abdurraqib into a lyrical, historical, and emotionally rich exploration of what it means to make it, who we think deserves success, the tensions between excellence and expectation, and the very notion of role models, all of which he expertly weaves together with intimate, personal storytelling. “Here is where I would like to tell you about the form on my father’s jump shot,” Abdurraqib writes. “The truth, though, is that I saw my father shoot a basketball only one time.”

"There’s Always This Year" is a triumph, brimming with joy, pain, solidarity, comfort, outrage, and hope. No matter the subject of his keen focus – whether it’s basketball, music, or performance -- Abdurraqib’s exquisite writing is always poetry, always profound, and always a clarion call to radically reimagine how we think about our culture, our country, and ourselves.

Abdurraqib (FAN ’21) will be in conversation with Ross Gay, Ph.D. (FAN ’23), the New York Times bestselling author of the essay collections "The Book of (More) Delights," "The Book of Delights," and "Inciting Joy" and four books of poetry. His "Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude" won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award; and "Be Holding" won the 2021 PEN America Jean Stein Book Award.