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Common Reading at Elon

The 2026-2027 Common Reading will be There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by poet, essayist, and cultural critic, Hanif Abdurraqib. Abdurraqib will give the Common Reading lecture on Tuesday, September 29.

The Common Reading committee, which comprises faculty from a variety of disciplines, staff from a variety of student life offices, and a student, notes that not only does There’s Always This Year meet the goals of the Common Reading program, it is a book that incoming first-year students can easily read on their own over the summer and be ready, along with their First-Year Foundations instructors, to discuss from a variety of perspectives during their first year at Elon. We’re especially pleased that this book was recommended to us by current students.

There’s Always This Year is segmented into four quarters like a basketball game played by the author’s beloved Cleveland Cavaliers, and it is part poetry, part memoir, and part meditation on heroes—sports and otherwise—of history and modern culture. It is also an ode—a love poem—to people and place and demonstrates how love can make the ordinary iconic.

Hanif Abdurraqib promises to be a powerful speaker, generous with his thoughts, words, and time. Along with talking about themes in his book, he might be found talking to our community about writing, music, Ohio aviators, and, yes, sports, especially basketball and soccer.

Abdurraqib is 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. His first collection of essays, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was released in winter 2017 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. In 2021, he released the book A Little Devil In America with Random House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the The PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. The book won the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the Gordon Burn Prize.

Accessing the Common Reading

Every first-year student will be provided with a free electronic copy of the Common Reading! This version and information about the book and how to prepare to use it in class will be available on Canvas in July. Look for an email in early summer about how to access your copy. If you prefer to purchase a print or audio copy, please do! You’ll be able to opt out of the digital version.

¸£ÀûÑÇÖÞ¹ú²ú¾«Æ· the Elon Common Reading Program

The Common Reading marks the beginning of the Elon Core Curriculum, the shared courses and experiences that put knowledge into practice and enable the integration of learning across the disciplines.

Consistent with the ¸£ÀûÑÇÖÞ¹ú²ú¾«Æ· mission of nurturing a rich intellectual community, the Elon Common Reading Program (ECRP) challenges students, faculty, and staff to examine themselves and the local and global worlds they inhabit through reading. The readings and related discussions aim not only to encourage critical reflection about important issues but also to invite consideration of how our individual actions affect these issues.

The ECRP will:

• Offer diverse perspectives and commentary on key issues affecting our lives;
• Provide forums to question and discuss these perspectives in depth;
• Encourage integration of these ideas and perspectives in other aspects of the Elon experience;
• Foster critical thinking by offering multiple opportunities to examine and reflect upon the reading throughout the year.