IMHOTEP GARY BYRD
Radio Personality
IMHOTEP GARY BYRD is an award-winning poet, songwriter, motivational speaker, and radio broadcaster fixated on culture and politics for almost half a century. He cut his teeth in radio as a teen, hired by Black radio station WUFO, in Buffalo, NY, home of radio legends Eddie O’Jay, Frankie Crocker, and Jerry Bledsoe. Later, WYSL, a mainstream radio station, offered him a job. Restless in Buffalo, he followed his mentors downstate to WWRL-AM, NYC’s top Black station, where he stayed for 15 years, coining his night-long show The GBE, Gary Byrd Experience. In the ‘80s, Inner City Broadcasting Chairman Percy Sutton invited him to WLIB as a talk show host and later to its sister station WBLS-FM, where Imhotep has been on air for 35 years. His GBE, now the Global Black Experience, also airs on WBAI-FM on Saturdays at 5 pm. Byrd the songwriter has collaborated with Stevie Wonder, and is a spoken word recorded artist who plans to launch his own GBE Radio Network.
