artist | author bio
brad walrond
Black Boy Magic Honing His (Witch) Craft
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 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. His conceptual practice urgently asks how can we cultivate 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, house 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 he was commissioned to participate in a theater production keynoted by Harry Belafonte. Brad soon became one of the most sought after writers and performers of the 1990’s Black Arts Movement centered in New York City. His poetics and praxis have taken him across the country and as far as São Paulo, Brazil and Taipei, Taiwan.
Brad is published in journals: Eleven Eleven, Moko Caribbean Arts and Letters, About Place, Wordpeace, Taint Taint Taint, African Voices Magazine, and Poem-a-Day Academy of American Poets. His works include recordings “Underneath the Metal” on Eargasms: Crucial Poetics: vol. 1; “Fallopia” on Shelley Nicole’s album, I Am American, Walrond’s own full length album AlienDay, including the multimedia installation Blood Brothers and the short film, Cyborg Heaven. Brad is a graduate of The City College of New York and earned his M.A in Political Science from Columbia University.
Brad’s poetry, from the beginning of his career, focused on the black experience. Coming home to Brooklyn at the height of the Neo-Soul era, meant moving in spaces where friends and creatives purposefully integrated aspects of African and indigenous traditions into their community practice. The Tea Party at Frank’s Lounge was chief among them and soon became Brad’s creative home. House music was embraced, not merely as entertainment, but as ritual, and spiritual practice woven into an open celebration of spirit, culture, queerness, and desire. Publicly, Brad’s work matured. Quietly, Brad found room to begin working out his own questions surrounding his spiritual path and his emergent queer identity.
“By the time I was 14—like most teens—I was contending with attraction and identity,” says Brad. “I had girlfriends in high school and college so when I began realizing that I was also attracted to guys it took me for a head-spin, especially because I spent so much time nurturing my own call to ministry straight-jacketed inside the square corners of an evangelical faith community and a loving but certainly conservative immigrant Caribbean family.”
Brad flourished inside these new life affirming spaces. Important friendships grew with fellow artists whose personal and creative lives were well entrenched in the powerful music and cultural legacies of Larry Levan’s legendary Paradise Garage, Tim Regisford’s Club Shelter, and giants of the Black Rock Coalition. The Tea Party itself, helmed by artist and DJ Ian Friday, was a Black arts and world music university. The immersion in New York City underground music and dance culture, Brad testifies,“was a rich exchange between relationships and culture which catalyzed my spiritual transformation, the expansion of my world view and guided me through the foundational moments of my evolution as a man and as a creative.”
I Put a Spell on You
Shelley Nicole, Brad’s dear friend, and a stellar gutsy musician, singer, and songwriter called and invited him to contribute to her full-length album, which was being produced by iconic Living Colour guitarist/songwriter Vernon Reid. “To be recording music in such great company felt so satisfying,” says Brad gleefully. And he’s been back at it ever since. As the COVID pandemic caught wind, Brad was already tapped into his writing and multimedia performance practice. In 2020, Blood Brothers was commissioned as a performance installation for the groundbreaking Interminable Prescriptions for the Plague exhibition in MOCA-Taipei. The following year, the Chinese Cultural Center in San Francisco commissioned Blood Brothers as a video installation for their WOMEN: From Her to Here exhibit. Blood Brothers' contextualizes the deep stigmas associated with queerness and illness in Taiwan’s current HIV pandemic to the waves of cultural oppression resulting from its serial colonial-settler legacy.
Back in New York City Brad returned to the health and wellness space focused on managing leadership development interventions for at-risk queer youth of color in the House Ballroom scene. “This was one of the most transformative things I’ve ever done,” says Brad with an infectious smile. He created an artistic residency in São Paulo to helm a documentary titled, “Zion,” a story exploring how black queer networks in the afore-mentioned cities create their own identities, agency, art, and community. “I am driven to explore how cultures and ideas collide. How from the aftermath humans manage to co-create new futures for themselves.” This time in his creative quest, Brad shares, “I felt a renewed determination never to conceal the most integral parts of myself. My pen would be free to travel unconditionally in service to the freedom of others.”
Both his new album Alien Day and upcoming book, Every Where Alien, by Moore Black Press/Amistad HarperCollins (slated to be released August 2024) explores themes of identity and belonging amidst New York City’s underground art and resistance movements.
The arts scene in New York City took notice. Producer Marco Jengkens invited Brad to be part of the critically-acclaimed spoken word compilation album, Eargasms: Crucial poetics vol. 1. Brad’s track, “Underneath the Metal,” is an ode to the treasures that spring out of black phraseology. The album features other notable peers such as Saul Williams, jessica Care moore, Tony Medina, Sara Jones, Yasiin Bey, Mike Ladd, and more.
As Brad’s notoriety grew, he still felt as though something was missing. “In some ways, I don’t think I ever left the church,” Brad shares. “Poetry for me was and is always anchored in truth telling, healing, and ministry.” Brad’s burgeoning work in public health and HIV/AIDS prevention took to the foreground. As Director of Education for Minority Task Force on AIDS, NYC’s first African-American non-profit institution marshaling a total response to the homelessness and health disparities of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, this life-giving work fastly became a new and unexpected proving ground. “Ironically, it was in this space, and not the poetry scene per se, where I encountered in fuller form the black queer radical poetics of activist giants like Essex Hemphill, Assotto Saint, and Colin Robinson. This public health and community organizing work is what led me to a graduate school program centered in Political Science and Social Movements. I saw firsthand how Black men—and especially Black and Latino queer young people—were often tossed aside and discarded. I wanted, if I could, to be a conduit for courage and change for those facing the political and mental health consequences that go with the vicious stigma projected onto black and queer identities,” says Brad.
For a decade and a half, Brad immersed himself in public health prevention and advocacy work locally and nationally. In the throes of a brutal depression, Brad took leave of his doctoral program and went to culinary school. “For the next five years, I cooked in some of New York City’s finest and Michelin starred kitchens,” Brad reflects. In the meantime, Brad’s creative work was effectively benched. The lull lasted, Brad says, until the untimely deaths of two outlandishly gifted creatives who were close friends and beacons from our scene. “Their commitment to art, and community gave me the creative courage to test boundaries and to grow as an artist; their passing knocked me off the dead letter shelf, so to speak.”
Poetry and music are Brad’s alchemy, an excavation of the traumas we’ve survived while painting possibilities for life and joy outside the limits of settler colonial capitalism and white supremacy. When listening to his album AlienDay , it’s difficult not to think of artists like Sun Ra or Octavia Butler when listening to this album.
The album is a cosmic explosion of black love and self-affirmations seen through the lens of a futuristic Afro-traditional landscape. AlienDay is Brad’s collaborative effort with genre defying producer & composer Howard Alper. AlienDay gives a nod to the sounds of underground hip hop in the 90s. (Think a cross between Kendrick Lamar, Digable Planets and Gangstarr.)
The music on Alien Day covers styles from “boom-bap” hip hop to glitch house and experimental ambient. The contagious first single, “Every Where Alien,” takes listeners on a journey through martyrdom and revitalization, reinforcing the notion that black history, black art, black desires, can never and will never be annihilated. With award-winning poets Mike Ladd and jessica Care moore the track, “Open Cypher,” testifies that hip hop was always about world making and future building. The cypher makes room for the black bazaar.
Alien Day is a much needed work of art that brilliantly witnesses the powers of metamorphosis when caught somewhere behind a colonized gaze and a world beset by pandemics and political division. AlienDay calls on the landscape and testimony of the New York City underground to signal the possibility for wholly emancipated selves tapped into the fullness of their ancestral and queer roots—even now, especially in this polarized zeitgeist.
Both Alien Day and Every Where Alien are powerful offerings that dare to dream a future for Afrodiasporic people in their/our totality. Brad’s literary prowess is undeniable. And his star is back on the rise because if Langston Hughes, Audre Lorde and Amiri Baraka had a baby, Brad would be it.