Hanif Abdurraqib on Gloria Naylor's THE WOMEN OF BREWSTER PLACE

Hanif Abdurraqib (winner of a 2024 Windham Campbell Prize for Non-Fiction) joins Michael Kelleher to discuss his love for Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place, writing about cities, the importance of community, and more. Reading list:  The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor • Mama Day by Gloria Naylor • Linden Hills by Gloria Naylor • Your Blues Ain't Like Mine by Bebe Moore Campbell • The Easy Rawlins novels by Walter Mosley • Waiting to Exhale by Terry McMillan For a full episode transcript, click here. Hanif Abdurraqib is the author of three critically acclaimed books of nonfiction and five poetry collections. A writer of extraordinary depth, style, and range, Abdurraqib is a public intellectual in the truest sense of the term, combining discursive flexibility with a profound emotional and intellectual rigor. In both his essays and in books like A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance (2021), Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest (2019), and They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us (2017), Abdurraqib moves through a wide range of subjects—Michael Jackson and moon walks, Sun Ra and NASA missions—incorporating the personal and the political with both joy and seeming effortlessness. He is the recipient of an Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction (2022), the Gordon Burn Prize (2021), and a MacArthur Fellowship (2021) among other honors. Abdurraqib is also the host of a weekly podcast called “Object of Sound” with Sonos Radio. The Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast is a program of The Windham-Campbell Prizes, which are administered by Yale University Library's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices