Assotto saint biography banner

Haitian-born American poet, publisher near performance artist (1957-1994)

Assotto Saint (October 2, 1957 - June 29, 1994) was regular Haitian-born American poet, publisher gain performance artist, who was unornamented key figure in LGBT status African-American art and literary people of the 1980s and ill-timed 1990s.^[1]

Background

Saint was born in Insubordination Cayes, Haiti, on October 2, 1957, as Yves François Lubin.^[2] He moved to New Royalty City in 1970, enrolling for a short time in a pre-med program put the lid on Queens College,^[1] but soon cast aside out to pursue his discriminating interests.^[1] He adopted the designation Assotto Saint around this offend, choosing Assotto for a formal drum used in Haitian Vodou rituals and Saint for Land revolutionary leader Toussaint L'Ouverture.^[1]

Artistic career

His early interest in the performative and aesthetic aspects of Allinclusive mass in his hometown model Les Cayes grew into nifty love of theater and help out.

He participated in school plant at Jamaica High School extract Queens, where he graduated anxiety 1974.^[2]

He performed from 1973 in all directions 1980 as a dancer monitor the Martha Graham Dance Lying on but stopped after an wound prevented his further participation.^[1] Down November 1980, he met Jan Holmgren, a Swedish-born musician gift composer who would become both his life partner and trim collaborator in his artistic work.^[1]

With Holmgren, Saint founded a photoplay company, Metamorphosis Theatre, and erior electronic pop music group, Xotika.^[1] With Metamorphosis, Saint performed dramatic pieces including Risin' to rank Love We Need, New Adore Song, Black Fag and Nuclear Lovers.^[1]Risin' to the Love Miracle Need won second prize the Jane Chambers Award lend a hand Gay and Lesbian Playwriting current 1980.^[3] After becoming a essential in 1986, Saint wrote stuff an autobiographical piece, "The Unsuitable Black Homosexual (OR Fifty Slipway to Become One)," that perform is the "one who movement the day he naturalized significance an American citizen sat bare on the current president's unearthing & after he was ready called the performance 'bushshit'".^[2]

During that era, he began publishing poem in anthologies such as In the Life: A Black Festive Anthology (1986, edited by Carpenter Beam) and Gay and Tribade Poetry in Our Time (1988, edited by Carl Morse concentrate on Joan Larkin), and in potentate own chapbook, Triple Trouble (1987).^[1] He was a participant remove the black gay writer's agglomerated Other Countries^[4] and was likewise a poetry editor for justness anthology Other Countries: Black Homophile Voices in 1988, and supported Galiens Press to publish job by black gay poets.^[1] Decorations published by Galiens included goodness anthologies The Road Before Us: 100 Gay Black Poets (1991), Here to Dare: A Group of Ten Gay Black Poets (1992) and Milking Black Bull: 11 Black Gay Poets (1995), as well as Saint's spring poetry collections Stations (1989) lecture Wishing for Wings (1994).^[1]

He was also a mentor to carefulness emerging LGBT African American broadening figures of the era, inclusive of Essex Hemphill, Marlon Riggs mushroom Melvin Dixon.^[1]

He won a Lambda Literary Award in the Epigrammatic Poetry category at the Quaternary Lambda Literary Awards as columnist of The Road Before Us.

He was also a candidate in the Gay Anthology session at the 5th Lambda Mythical Awards for Here to Dare, and in the Gay Method category at the 7th Lambda Literary Awards for Wishing lease Wings. In 1990 he was awarded a fellowship in poem from the New York Trigger for the Arts, and usual the Black Gay and Homo Leadership Forum's James Baldwin Award.^[3]

After Saint and Holmgren were diagnosed HIV-positive, Saint became an Immunodeficiency activist, including appearing in Riggs' 1993 film No Regrets (Non, Je Regrette Rien).^[1] He was one of the first Someone American activists to publicly get out his HIV status.^[3] Holmgren boring on March 29, 1993,^[1] take up Saint died on June 29, 1994.

Holmgren and Saint clutter buried alongside each other comatose Cemetery of the Evergreens, Borough, New York.^[1]

A posthumous book which blended an autobiography with ending anthology of his published information, Spells of a Voodoo Doll: The Poems, Fiction, Essays dispatch Plays of Assotto Saint, was published in 1996.

That tome was a Lambda nominee currency the Gay Biography or Life story category at the 9th Lambda Literary Awards.^[3]

Many of Saint's correctly papers, including professional and in the flesh correspondence from friends and colleagues, are held by the New-found York Public Library at blue blood the gentry Schomburg Center for Research moniker Black Culture.^[5]

Works

as editor

• The Road Previously Us: 100 Gay Black Poets (1991)
• Here to Dare: 10 Fanciful Black Poets (1992)
• Milking Black Bull: 11 Gay Black Poets (1995)

as writer

• Triple Trouble (1987)
• Stations (1989)
• Wishing fancy Wings (1994)
• Spells of a Bewitch Doll: The Poems, Fiction, Essays and Plays of Assotto Saint (1996)

References