THERE'S ALWAYS THIS YEAR - Hanif Abdurraqib (with Furqan Mohamed)

Tickets are General Admission and do not guarantee seating. Dinner reservations guarantee seating and are available at , [email protected] or 416-588-0307

Check out the Lula dinner menu: lula.ca/menu

6:00pm - Doors open for dinner & drinks

7:00pm - Show

Join us for the Toronto launch of There's Always This Year, by Hanif Abdurraqib! Featuring a conversation with Furqan Mohamed.

Tickets are $10 for entrance only/ $47 for book and ticket combo (save $5!)

Tickets are general admission and do not guarantee seating.

For guaranteed seating reserve a table to enjoy Lula’s tropical fusion menu before the show: https://www.lula.ca/reservations or call 416-588-0307.

Books will be for sale and Hanif Abdurraqib will be signing.

Co-sponsored by Random House of Canada and Lula Lounge.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

Growing up in Columbus, Ohio, in the 1990s, Hanif Abdurraqib witnessed a golden era of basketball, one in which legends like LeBron James 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 tension between excellence and expectation, and the very notion of role models, all of which he expertly weaves together with intimate, personal storytelling.

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, or music, or performance—Hanif 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.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His poetry has been published in Muzzle, Vinyl, PEN American, and various other journals. His essays and music criticism have been published in The FADER, Pitchfork, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. Hanif’s newest release, There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension (Random House, 2024) is a poignant, personal reflection on basketball, life, and home and a New York Times bestseller. His first full length poetry collection, The Crown Ain't Worth Much, was released in June 2016 from Button Poetry. It was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize, and was nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. His first collection of essays, They Can't K*ll Us Until They K*ll Us, was released in winter 2017 by Two Dollar Radio and was named a book of the year by Buzzfeed, Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, Paste, CBC, The Los Angeles Review, Pitchfork, and The Chicago Tribune, among others. He released Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest with University of Texas press in February 2019. The book became a New York Times Bestseller, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. His second collection of poems, A Fortune For Your Disaster, was released in 2019 by Tin House, and won the 2020 Lenore Marshall Prize. His book, A Little Devil In America (Random House, 2021) was a winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal and the Gordon Burn Prize, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pen/Diamonstein-Spielvogel 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.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER:

Furqan Mohamed is a writer and educator from Toronto interested in all things culture, diaspora, kinship, and abolition. She has written for publications such as Room Magazine, Canthius, Maisonneuve, and The Local, where she was an inaugural Journalism Fellow and 2022 Digital Publishing Award nominee. Her debut chapbook collection of poetry and prose, "a small homecoming," was published by Party Trick Press in 2021. You can find more of her poetry as part of the "Poems in Passage" project on the TTC, an episode of "Dreams in Vantablack," streaming on CBC Gem, and a 2022 artist residency with the inPrint Collective in collaboration with the Mackenzie House museum. She has served as a moderator and facilitator for the Toronto Black Film Festival, the Montreal International Black Film Festival, and the Mayworks Festival Of Working People. Forever occupied with language, Furqan currently works on sales, marketing, and community for trace press, an independent publisher concerned with literary translation, along with building the reading series "Who's Afraid?" and completing her Master of Arts in Child Study and Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.

Host or Publisher Lula Lounge / Lula Music & Arts Centre