They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

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By Hanif Abdurraqib & Eve L. Ewing

Publisher Description

Hanif Abdurraqib — a 2021 MacArthur 'Genius' Grant Recipient — 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. He is the author of the poetry collections The Crown Ain't Worth Much, a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize, and A Fortune For Your Disaster, which won the 2020 Lenore Marshall Prize, and the essay collections They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, named a best book of the year by Buzzfeed, Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, Paste, CBC, The Los Angeles Review, Pitchfork, and The Chicago Tribune, among others; Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest, a New York Times Bestseller, a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, and longlisted for the National Book Award; and A Little Devil In America, which was shortlisted for the National Book Award. He is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.

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Share your take with other readers with half stars, emojis, and tags

Curate your feed

Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communities

1163 Reviews

4.5

Jeanine 🍉

Created 1 day ago

Megan_K

Created 3 days ago

“"It's one thing to be good at what you do and it's another thing to be good and bold enough to have fun while doing it." This book- wow. I absolutely loved the layout, the research, the diverse representation! Centered around music, this read constantly had me pausing the audiobook to listen to that song by Fleetwood Mac/ Chance the Rapper/Whitney Huston/My Chemical Romance/Carly Rae Jepson that Hanif so expertly broke down- both with historical facts and his own experiences with the song. Complete and utter art, all of it.”

donttelltheelf

Created 5 days ago

Chrissy

Created 5 days ago

“Preferred on audio!”

Reviewed in:The Well Done Books Club

Vicky

Created 5 days ago

“This is my first book of essays and I enjoyed it immensely. Every essay interwoven with raw, real, and relevant life experiences with music that can define surviving a black Muslim life in the US. Exploring the music, after reading each essay was nostalgic, but also very dark. Music has so much power over us all.”

Believable Educational Thought-provoking

About Hanif Abdurraqib

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. 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. With Big Lucks, he released a limited edition chapbook, Vintage Sadness, in summer 2017. His first collection of essays, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill 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 is a Callaloo Creative Writing Fellow, an interviewer at Union Station Magazine, and a poetry editor at Muzzle Magazine. He is a member of the poetry collective Echo Hotel with poet/essayist Eve Ewing.
His next books are Go Ahead In The Rain, a biography of A Tribe Called Quest due out in 2019 by University of Texas Press, and They Don't Dance No' Mo', due out in 2020 by Random House.

Other books by Hanif Abdurraqib

There's Always This Year

Hanif Abdurraqib

$13.99

Motherfield

Julia Cimafiejeva & Hanif Abdurraqib &

$9.95

Sing, Aretha, Sing!

Hanif Abdurraqib & Ashley Evans

$11.99

Respect the Mic

Peter Kahn & Hanif Abdurraqib &

$9.99

A Little Devil in America

Hanif Abdurraqib

$4.99

It Came From Memphis

Robert Gordon & Peter Guralnick &

$19.95

A Fortune for Your Disaster

Hanif Abdurraqib

$16.95

Prince: The Last Interview

Prince & Hanif Abdurraqib

$9.99

Eve L. Ewing

Dr. Eve L. Ewing is a sociologist of education and a writer from Chicago. She is the author of Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago's South Side. She is also author of Electric Arches, which received awards from the American Library Association and the Poetry Society of America and was named one of the year's best books by NPR and the Chicago Tribune. She is the co-author (with Nate Marshall) of the play No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks. She also writes the Ironheart series for Marvel Comics. Ewing is an assistant professor at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and many other venues.