BLACK MEN, TRAUMA AND MENTAL ILLNESS: AN OPEN COMMUNITY CONVERSATION

SATURDAY NOVEMBER 5th, 3:00 pm-4:30 pm

Maysles Documentary Center

343 Lenox Ave. (near 127 St).

Reel Sisters Lecture Series explores trauma experienced by Black men and its connection to mental illness. **Christopher Rogers**, a Certified Peer Specialist, CarePATH Coach and Program Director for Baltic Street AEH, Inc., will engage in conversation with author/poet/filmmaker **Brad Walrond** who shares his story on healing from depression. A short film on hip-hop artist Wayne and his experiences with trauma and mental illness will be screened before the panel.

An Open Community Conversation and Q&A will follow, with audience members encouraged to share their own mental health struggles.

BIOS

CHRISTOPHER ROGERS, Facilitator

Christopher Rogers is a Certified Peer Specialist, CarePATH Coach and Program Director for Baltic Street AEH, Inc., as well as a New York Peer Conference Board Member and facilitator for the Healing through Hip Hop paneling committee supported by OMH. For the last 15-years Christopher Rogers has been working with collaborating, supporting, and moving people and communities forward with his ideas for a better way to live and do things. From 25 years in fashion as a men’s wear designer to 20 plus years touring the world as an entertainer in Hip Hop to becoming the COO to the community based F.O.O.D. Foundation to becoming the Director of the Adult Home Initiative program for Baltic Street AEH, Inc. and facilitating the monthly men’s support groups for Autismandwe.org, all while living with and journeying through my mental health concerns, battling ESRD (End Stage Renal Disease) on Dialysis and undergoing a kidney transplant mid pandemic to this forum and stage. I am honored to be here.

BRAD WALROND, Panelist

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 experience and co-create historical, remembered, and imagined time. An urgency suffuses his work with an eye toward cultivating the embodiment of habitable futures we can viably fashion out 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.