Each year, the Orientation Book Committee, selects a work for the entire first-year class and transfers to read before arriving on campus. During Orientation, discussions on the book are led by Pomona College faculty, staff, and administration with small groups of new students. The book will be shipped to all U.S. and Canadian new students, with other international students being given a digital copy. (Hard copies are also available for international students upon move-in on August 13, 2025.)
This year's orientation book is They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us by Hanif Abdurraqib.
Orientation Book 2025
About the Book
In an age of confusion, fear, and loss, Hanif Abdurraqib’s is a voice that matters. Whether he’s attending a Bruce Springsteen concert the day after visiting Michael Brown’s grave, or discussing public displays of affection at a Carly Rae Jepsen show, he writes with a poignancy and magnetism that resonates profoundly.
In the wake of the nightclub attacks in Paris, he recalls how he sought refuge as a teenager in music, at shows, and wonders whether the next generation of young Muslims will not be afforded that opportunity now. While discussing the everyday threat to the lives of black Americans, Abdurraqib recounts the first time he was ordered to the ground by police officers: for attempting to enter his own car.
In essays that have been published by the New York Times, MTV, and Pitchfork, among others―along with original, previously unreleased essays―Abdurraqib uses music and culture as a lens through which to view our world, so that we might better understand ourselves, and in so doing proves himself a bellwether for our times. - Button Poetry
Hanif Abdurraqib is something between an empath and an illusionist. Among the thousands who have read his work, I am confident that I am not alone when I say that Hanif lured me in with a magic trick — by apparently knowing the textures of my relationship to songs and athletes and places that I love. He knows our secrets. He has an uncanny ability to write about music and the world around it as though he was sitting there on the couch with you in your grandma’s basement, listening to her old vinyl, or he was in that car with you and your high school friend who would later become your boyfriend, when you sat in the back with your headphones on trying to look a lot harder and meaner than you really were. He seems to know all about that summer, that breakup, that mix she made you that you lost when someone broke into your car later that year. - Eve L. Ewing, Forward to They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us
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. 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 (you cannot get it anymore and he is very sorry.) 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 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. Hanif is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.
About the Publisher
They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us was published by Two Dollar Radio, an indie press based in Abdurraqib’s hometown of Columbus, Ohio.
“Two Dollar Radio is a family-run outfit dedicated to reaffirming the cultural and artistic spirit of the publishing industry. We aim to do this by presenting bold works of literary merit, each book, individually and collectively, providing a sonic progression that we believe to be too loud to ignore.”
Over the course of the summer, this page will be updated with the following:
- Background resources for the book and Abdurraqib's creative work
- Summer online book club meet-up information (happening mid-July through mid-August)
- Future tie-in events happening throughout the fall and spring semesters
Follow CSWIMstagram for updates about orientation book summer programming and fall semester on-campus events.
About your Orientation Book Partners
The Orientation Book Partners provide resources and scaffolding around the orientation book, and serve as a source of support for incoming students. In July and August, they will host Zoom discussions exploring questions and themes in the book's essays. Join to connect with current and incoming Pomona students, and get a sense of what academic discussion can look like in a college environment!
Meet the 2025 Orientation Book Partners
What is your relationship to They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us?
Zoe Dorado (PO'27)
I came across Hanif Abdurraqib’s work when I was 16. It was a YouTube video of him reciting a spoken word poem of what would eventually become his essay, “Carly Rae Jepsen And the Kingdom of Desire,” one of the last pieces in They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us. I watched it over and over again. I was obsessed. The video, “Tell a Friend That You're in Love With Them Tonight: on ‘Your Type,’” was part of a series by Drunk Education celebrating Jepsen’s album (or, as they described it, “religious text”) “E•MO•TION.” Hanif sat at the end of the stage just a few feet away from his audience, and I held my phone a few inches away from my face as he spoke about crushes, loneliness, being friendzoned, and the strange logics of desire. I love Hanif Abdurraqib’s work and this book because he writes with a specific obsession that seems fueled by both love and uncertainty about the world. He’s not an optimist, yet his work has a propelling force. They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us is the type of book that I know I’ll return to during different stages of my life.
Nadia Hsu (PO'27)
I first learned about Hanif Abdurraqib my senior year of high school, when my English teacher had us read his essay on You’ve Got Mail (published in 4Columns) and “On Future And Working Through What Hurts,” which is included in They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us. I almost immediately bought the book, and read it the summer after high school. That year, as I prepared to leave for college and reckoned with a desire for the relationships, places, and moments in time that I felt were disappearing, the appearance of Abdurraqib’s work in my life felt serendipitous and necessary. I started reading They Can’t Kill Us at the same time that I started going to church, driving around the most familiar streets in my neighborhood, and listening to the music that my parents liked. Everything I’ve ever written since then has been kind of an imitation of Abdurraqib, and the way under his observation everything becomes sacred.