Victor Billione Frē (pronounced bil-LEE-ahn Free) is an intersectional spoken word performer, speaker, and writer who uses his words to liberate himself from past trauma. Born a poor, queer, black boy in Detroit, Victor has taken the elements of his challenging life and used them to inform his art. He refers to his creative process as alchemy. “I take the painful parts of my life, and transform them into art. If that isn’t alchemy, I don’t know what it is.”
A gifted poet, Victor’s poem ‘Undercurrent’ was put to photography and film for the Detroit PBS program ‘Detroit Performs’ in 2013. In 2017, he was featured in the reality docuseries ‘Out Loud in the D’ that highlighted the lives of black LGBT Detroiters.
In 2007, Victor began publishing his own writing offering collections of poetry including his debut chapbook Love: In Hindsight (2007) and Centric (2010), and a short novel titled ‘No Tea. No Shade.’ in 2013. In 2015, his coming out story titled ‘Thirty-eight’ was featured in Don’t Ask Don’t Tell: an anthology of short stories.
Victor is a dynamic, sought after performer who fuses poetry and music into an experience that heals as much as it entertains. He was featured twice in the Ill Playbill produced series A Man Can Change, as well as LaShaun Phoenix Moore presents the Autumn Soundtrack, both coveted venues in the Detroit community.
At age 40, after suffering a mental heath crisis, Victor decided to end his life. Years of abuse, depression, and hopelessness caught up with him. Rather than committing suicide, he committed himself to following his childhood dream of living in New York City, and performing on Broadway. Without a plan, he walked away from his life in Detroit and moved to Brooklyn. After getting into therapy and learning to reconcile his past, Victor penned ‘Breathe’ a spoken word piece focused on never giving up. His performance of ‘Breathe’ can be seen on the Manhattan Neighborhood Network program Volume on 10, which constitutes is first New York television performance.
An active member of SGI-USA, Victor practices Nichiren Buddhism. He currently lives in New York City where he is writing a hybrid book of poetry, memoir, and meditations titled ‘Every Jungle Needs a King’, and a one person play titled ‘By the Light of the Moon’, an autobiographical account of a man who accidentally lives past forty, then learns to live.