Join us for Lit Friday, a virtual program from the August Wilson African American Cultural Center, hosted by literary curator, poet, and art writer Jessica Lanay. Streaming on Facebook and YouTube, Lit Friday welcomes writers, artists, and thinkers of the African Diaspora to share their latest works and explore how their art connects with today’s cultural and political conversations. This month’s featured guest is Brad Walrond, a poet, author, and performance artist whose work delves into identity, memory, and the possibilities of reimagining our shared futures. Tune in for an evening of thought-provoking dialogue and creative inspiration.
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 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.