NBF Presents: Cultural Icons

In their most recent essay collections, National Book Award honorees Hanif Abdurraqib (There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension, 2024 Nonfiction Longlister) and Vanessa Angélica Villarreal (Magical/Realism: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders, 2024 Nonfiction Longlister) write about the people, places, and things that they love and, sometimes, that disappoint them—from basketball to Beyoncé. Join the authors for readings and conversation on the relationship between pop culture and contemporary literature.

Moderated by Richard Purcell, researcher, writer, and Associate Professor at the University of Mississippi.

Limited free copies of There's Always This Year and Magical/Realism will be available at the event, first come, first served. Contact Jen Waller at [email protected] to coordinate receiving books in advance. The program will be followed by a book signing.

Presented in partnership with Coahoma Community College, the Coahoma County Higher Education Center, and the National Book Foundation.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:

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 is a New York Times bestseller. His previous book, A Little Devil in America was a winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal and the Gordon Burn Prize, and a Finalist for the National Book Award. 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. 

Vanessa Angélica Villarreal was born in the Rio Grande Valley to Mexican immigrants. She is the author of Beast Meridian, which was a Whiting Award winner, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award finalist, and winner of the John A Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. She was a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, and her work has appeared in the New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles.

Richard Purcell is an Associate Professor and holds the Herbert H. McAlexander Chair of English at the University of Mississippi. He is currently working on book project that explores how the social and economic discourses of market liberalization influenced the way black artists think about the “work” of art during the Great Recession.

Host or Publisher National Book Foundation