- This event has passed.
Lit Fridays is a literary-focused, virtual salon presented by the August Wilson African American Cultural Center, featuring conversations and guest performances on the last Friday* of each month at 6:00p EST via Facebook Live and Zoom Webinar. All conversations are moderated by AWAACC Literary Curator, Jessica Lanay.
Brad Walrond
poet| author | filmmaker | mixed-media conceptual, performance artist |activist
Brad’s poetics, performance, and multi-disciplinary work interpolates between virtual reality, identity formation, and human consciousness at the intersection of race, gender, sex, and desire. By amplifying and interrogating the great power and contradictions inherent to identity Brad aims with his work to provoke futurist explorations of how we co-create historical, remembered, and imagined time. The urgency that suffuses Brad’s work interrogates the great power and contradictions inherent to identity and ask how can we cultivate habitable futures worthy of the common and conflicting threads of our human inheritance.
Walrond’s forthcoming debut collection Every Where Alien, on Moore Black Press, Harper Collins, locates the author’s own black queer exploration of the world, and how these experiences map onto the discovery of co-occurring and overlapping art and resistance movements among New York City’s underground communities. Communities like the New Black Arts Movement, the New York Ballroom Scene, Black Rock Coalition, Underground house dance and music community, and the black queer political arts and activist movements that arose in response to racism homophobia transphobia and the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Brad is native to Brooklyn, New York and currently resides in the Bronx. Brad began writing and performing at the age of 24 when commissioned to participate in a theater production curated by Harry Belafonte. Brad soon became one of the foremost writers and performers of the 1990s Black Arts Movement centered in New York City. Brad’s poetics and praxis has taken him across the country and as far as São Paulo, Brazil and Taipei, Taiwan.