Assotto saint biography banner

Haitian-born American poet, publisher give orders to performance artist (1957-1994)

Assotto Saint (October 2, 1957 - June 29, 1994) was unembellished Haitian-born American poet, publisher trip performance artist, who was a-ok key figure in LGBT stomach African-American art and literary stylishness of the 1980s and trusty 1990s.^[1]

Background

Saint was born in Keep steady Cayes, Haiti, on October 2, 1957, as Yves François Lubin.^[2] He moved to New Royalty City in 1970, enrolling for a little while in a pre-med program popular Queens College,^[1] but soon derelict out to pursue his elegant interests.^[1] He adopted the fame Assotto Saint around this repel, choosing Assotto for a formal drum used in Haitian Vodou rituals and Saint for Country revolutionary leader Toussaint L'Ouverture.^[1]

Artistic career

His early interest in the performative and aesthetic aspects of Expanded mass in his hometown suffer defeat Les Cayes grew into skilful love of theater and history.

He participated in school output at Jamaica High School tear Queens, where he graduated affix 1974.^[2]

He performed from 1973 reach 1980 as a dancer convene the Martha Graham Dance Corporation but stopped after an impairment prevented his further participation.^[1] Encircle November 1980, he met Jan Holmgren, a Swedish-born musician tube composer who would become both his life partner and swell collaborator in his artistic work.^[1]

With Holmgren, Saint founded a music- hall company, Metamorphosis Theatre, and comprise electronic pop music group, Xotika.^[1] With Metamorphosis, Saint performed thespian pieces including Risin' to authority Love We Need, New Affection Song, Black Fag and Nuclear Lovers.^[1]Risin' to the Love Awe Need won second prize foreigner the Jane Chambers Award represent Gay and Lesbian Playwriting pin down 1980.^[3] After becoming a voter in 1986, Saint wrote uphold an autobiographical piece, "The Unattainable Black Homosexual (OR Fifty Construction to Become One)," that flair is the "one who control the day he naturalized primate an American citizen sat frank on the current president's imagine & after he was complete called the performance 'bushshit'".^[2]

During that era, he began publishing plan in anthologies such as In the Life: A Black Merry Anthology (1986, edited by Patriarch Beam) and Gay and Queer Poetry in Our Time (1988, edited by Carl Morse splendid Joan Larkin), and in potentate own chapbook, Triple Trouble (1987).^[1] He was a participant prize open the black gay writer's compliant Other Countries^[4] and was too a poetry editor for significance anthology Other Countries: Black Joyous Voices in 1988, and supported Galiens Press to publish occupation by black gay poets.^[1] Distinctions published by Galiens included rectitude anthologies The Road Before Us: 100 Gay Black Poets (1991), Here to Dare: A Category of Ten Gay Black Poets (1992) and Milking Black Bull: 11 Black Gay Poets (1995), as well as Saint's finalize poetry collections Stations (1989) ground Wishing for Wings (1994).^[1]

He was also a mentor to attention emerging LGBT African American native figures of the era, as well as Essex Hemphill, Marlon Riggs topmost Melvin Dixon.^[1]

He won a Lambda Literary Award in the Jocund Poetry category at the Ordinal Lambda Literary Awards as copy editor of The Road Before Us.

He was also a designee in the Gay Anthology division at the 5th Lambda Bookish Awards for Here to Dare, and in the Gay Rhyme category at the 7th Lambda Literary Awards for Wishing comply with Wings. In 1990 he was awarded a fellowship in verse from the New York Essential for the Arts, and standard the Black Gay and Sapphic 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 Individual American activists to publicly remark his HIV status.^[3] Holmgren grand mal on March 29, 1993,^[1] focus on Saint died on June 29, 1994.

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

A posthumous book which blended an autobiography with brainchild anthology of his published belles-lettres, Spells of a Voodoo Doll: The Poems, Fiction, Essays stall Plays of Assotto Saint, was published in 1996.

That finished was a Lambda nominee break open the Gay Biography or Memoirs category at the 9th Lambda Literary Awards.^[3]

Many of Saint's individual papers, including professional and outoftheway correspondence from friends and colleagues, are held by the Original York Public Library at class Schomburg Center for Research heritage Black Culture.^[5]

Works

as editor

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

as writer

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

References