BAM Announces Hanif Abdurraqib As Guest Curator At Large

BAM has announced Hanif Abdurraqib as guest curator at large beginning January 2021. Abdurraqib will collaborate with BAM's programming teams to curate music engagements and envision special, long-term projects. He brings a rich background transcending poetry, music, cultural criticism and Black performance.

"Evolving what the public understands as music performance has interested me for a long time. I am more invested in performance that is visually dynamic, or that spans genres and generations, and makes use of the natural world," said Abdurraqib. "The pandemic has helped expand my imagining of live music, and I know it has expanded the imagination of music-makers globally. I'm excited to use this role as a way to connect those adjacent imaginations. I'm also eager to feature Black artists-both young artists who are defining and shaping the future of sound and performance, and others I consider living ancestors."

"Working with Hanif pushes forward our effort to broaden BAM's curatorial voices," said BAM's Artistic Director, David Binder. "In Hanif's books, podcasts, and articles, he has introduced us to and chronicled musicians and artists working at the intersections of musical genres and performance. We're excited to follow Hanif to new, adventurous musical and artistic landscapes as a means to connect with artists who are speaking to the way we live now."

BAM continues to present a wide range of virtual programming and is preparing to reopen all of its stages and screens in 2021.

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. He is a Callaloo Creative Writing Fellow, a poetry editor at Muzzle Magazine, and a member of the poetry collective Echo Hotel with poet/essayist Eve L. Ewing. His podcast, Object of Sound recently launched on Sonos.

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, O, The 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 The 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. Abdurraqib's forthcoming history of Black performance in the United States titled A Little Devil in America is due out in March 2021. He also wrote and performed the current season of KCRW's acclaimed podcast Lost Notes: 1980.