Author of the 2024 collection of poems, Mountain Spells, and Winner of the 2025 Firebird Award For Poetry, Afrofuturist/Oro-shamanic poet and bass clarinetist Toussaint St. Negritude freely conjures the lyric timbre of both his horn and verse, creating his own multi-collaborative ceremony of emancipating explorations. Black, gay, artist, mountaineer, devout congregant of the wilderness, Toussaint St. Negritude honors his multiplicity of freedoms quite seriously. Intersectionally informed by the collective realms of liberation and the corresponding spirituality evoked by our surrounding mountains, his works are inherently intoned by both the liberation and the expansion of the African Diaspora.
Toussaint’s book Mountain Spells can be found and ordered from all bookstores, online sources, as well as directly from the publisher: https://www.rootstockpublishing.com/rootstock-books/p/mountain-spells
Diving brilliantly into the depths of Toussaint’s works, here’s a recent article published in Vermont’s largest weekly paper, 7 Days: https://www.sevendaysvt.com/music/farmers-night-performance-series-rocks-the-statehouse-43013646
Self-taught on the bass clarinet, poet and hat maker extraordinaire, Toussaint St. Negritude blends the unique dual performance of his poetry and reeds, by intuitively interspersing his words within the compositions of his bass clarinet, and/or vice versa, while also orchestrating the flair of a well-poised hat.
Illustrating the passionate and candid intersectional delivery of his words, vision, and life, Black, Queer and all, here’s a link to recent interview of Toussaint St. Negritude, on Vermont Public Radio’s podcast Homegoings, a weekly program, produced & hosted by the fabulous Myra Flynn, highlighting the voices of BIPOC Vermonters from throughout the state: https://www.vermontpublic.org/show/homegoings/2025-03-27/theres-nothing-soft-about-being-gay-a-conversation-with-65-year-old-toussaint-st-negritude
To see and hear and hear multiple live samples of Toussaint St. Negritude, please go to the Videography page!
Performing throughout the globe, along with the intuitively sensorial bassist Gahlord Dewald, Toussaint St. Negritude leads the jazz duo Jaguar Stereo, powerfully evoking the free-form dialogue of worlds far beyond the pale. Much as one might describe his horn, Pulitzer Prize Winner poet Gwendolyn Brooks described his poetry as “Full of Sweet Sounds and Surprises.” In his poem “Like Alice in the Garden of a Satchidananda Dream,” St. Negritude honors the Afrofuturist legacies of Alice Coltrane and Eric Dolphy and the interstellar-bound expansion of his own journey forward.
“like melodies in receptivitygreen as galaxies in profusion like orbs of Dolphy in connectivity ours is a Dogon cosmology in defiance of all colonization
leaping skies in seeds of wizardry we are that crystalline dignity impervious to mono-scopic conclusions shifting the consciousness like emissaries in perpetuity like the Afrinicity of Obatala on a far northern street like the frontiers of infinity shifting the consciousness like Alice in the garden of a Satchidananda dream…”
Toussaint St. Negritude is a former Poet Laureate of Belfast Maine, as well as a 2024 nominee for Vermont Poet Laureate and has published throughout his career in such journals as The Michigan Quarterly Review, Birchsong, Philadelphia Stories, The Savannah Literary Journal, The I’ve Known Rivers Project, and The San Francisco Bay Guardian. Toussaint St. Negritude has also performed extensively, including the venues of The Koret Auditorium of the San Francisco Public Library, The Philadelphia Free Library, The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, The University of Houston, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), The Village Voice (Paris), The Black Dot Collective (Oakland), The Loft (Minneapolis), The Belfast Public Library (Maine), and the Vermont venues of Bread & Puppets, The Spruce Peak Performance Arts Center, Catamount Arts, Sweet Melissa’s, Charlie O’s, Buch Spieler Records, and The Art Hop / Community of Sound.
Toussaint St. Negritude 