Join Charis in celebrating the publication of Assotto Saint's Sacred Spells: Collected Works. Featuring readings by Jericho Brown, G. Winston James, Young Hughley, and Michael Ward, and hosted by Franklin Abbott and Duncan Teague. This event is co-sponsored by the Counter Narrative Project, Atlanta Queer Literary Festival, and the Women and Gender Collections at the Georgia State University Archives.
In this timely collection of poetry, plays, fiction, and performance texts, Assotto Saint draws upon music and incantation, his Haitian heritage, and a politics of liberation to weave together a tapestry of literature that celebrates life in the face of death. Influential to contemporary writers such as Essex Hemphill, Marlon Riggs, and Melvin Dixon, Sacred Spells is Saint’s crucial legacy-five hundred incandescent pages of painful, lyric writing that exemplifies the visceral, spiritual dimensions of an artistic practice that’s integral to Black and LGBTQ activist movements worldwide, both historic and present.
Assotto Saint (born Yves Francois Lubin) was a Haitian-born American writer, performer, publisher and AIDS activist. As Publisher of Galiens Press, Assotto published two volumes of his poetry, Stations and Wishing For Wings. He edited two seminal anthologies of Black Gay writing: 1991 Lambda Literary Award winner The Road Before Us: 100 Gay Black Poets and Here To Dare: 10 Gay Black Poets. He was also the author of such plays as Risin' To The Love We Need, New Love Song, Black Fag and Nuclear Lovers. In 1990, he was awarded both the Fellowship in Poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the James Baldwin Award from the Black Gay Leadership Forum. Born in Haiti, October 2, 1957, he lived in New York City with Jan Urban Holmgren, his life partner and co-founder of Metamorphosis Theater and the techno-pop band Xotika. Saint died June 29,1994 of AIDS. Assotto Saint's poetry, fiction, essays, song lyrics, and plays are gathered in Sacred Spells: Collected Works (Nightboat Books, 2023).
About the Hosts
Franklin Abbott is a poet, psychotherapist, editor and activist. He published Assotto Saint in his anthology New Men, New Minds (Crossing Press, 1987) and in two magazines where he served as poetry editor, RFD and Changing Men. He and Saint became close friends and correspondents giving each other much needed support during the worst years of the AIDS epidemic. Saint's letters to Abbott are part of his papers in the Women and Gender Collection in the archives of Georgia State University. He is author of three anthologies of writings about men and masculinity, two volumes of poetry and a recording of original music and poetry, Don't Go Back To Sleep.
Duncan E. Teague (he, him, his) has been in Atlanta for 35 plus years and has been in some kind of relationship with Charis Books and More since his second year in Atlanta. He has been writing and performing poetry, writing for gay magazines; for HIV/AIDS, and now for Abundant Love Unitarian Universalist Congregation (Abundant LUUv) almost every week. He is the founding minister of this West End Unitarian Universalist congregation.
Teague’s first poetry in a gay anthology was published by Assotto Saint in The Road Before Us and he is very proud to have gotten to know Assotto personally. He is the surviving senior member of The ADODI Muse; A Gay Negro Ensemble, who have been doing the poetry-on-stage as theatre since longer than he admits. Previous work of The ADODI Muse is available on their CD “Ain’t Got Sense Enuf to be ‘Shamed”.
This poet (now reverend) is proof that you can survive prostate cancer, stay with your gay husband for more than twenty-five years, and start a church, all after you are eligible for AARP newsletters and coupons.
About the Co-Sponsors
The Atlanta Queer Literary Festival was founded in 2007 and has hosted numerous events that highlight LGBTQ writers living in Atlanta as well as inviting distinguished LGBTQ writers from around the country to come to Atlanta and share their work. Young Hughley is the festival's executive director. For more information visit www.atlantaqueerfest.com
The Counter Narrative Project (CNP) shifts narratives about Black gay, bisexual, queer, and other men who have sex with men to change policy and improve lives.
The Gender and Sexuality Collections at Georgia State University document LGBTQ+ communities in Georgia and the Southeast. They include manuscript collections, audio visual materials, textiles, artifacts, newspapers and magazines, and oral histories.
4 май 2024
