BRAD WALROND

Brad’s poetics, performance, and multi-disciplinary work interpolate 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 contractions 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 his work asks how we can cultivate habitable futures worthy of the common threads of our human inheritance. Walrond’s debut collection, Every Where Alien, focuses on the author’s own Black queer exploration of the world, and how these experiences map onto the discovery of co-occurring art and resistance movements among New York City’s underground communities—communities like the New Black Arts Movement, the New York House 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 the ravages of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Brad is native to Brooklyn, New York and currently resides with his partner in the Bronx.  He began writing and performing at the age of 24 when commissioned to participate in a theater production curated by Harry Belafonte, and soon became one of the foremost writers and performers of the 1990s Black Arts Movement centered in New York City.

Published in:

The Atlantic | Poem-A-Day | Academy of American Poets | African Voices Magazine | About Place Journal | et al.

photo: Elise Swain