About The Artist

Afrofuturist / Oro-shamanic poet and bass clarinetist Toussaint St. Negritude dually conjures the lyric timbre of both his horn and verse, creating his own collaborative ceremony of empathic wonders. Black, queer, artist, mountaineer, devout congregant of the wilderness, Toussaint St. Negritude honors his multiplicity of freedoms quite seriously. Perennially informed by the pan-cosmic realms of philosophic discovery and the corresponding spirituality evoked by the surrounding Green Mountains of Vermont, his works are inherently intoned by both the liberation and the expansion of the African Diaspora. Self-taught on the bass clarinet, poet, hat maker extraordinaire, Toussaint St. Negritude blends the unique dual performance of his poetry and reeds, by interspersing his words with the compositions of his bass clarinet. Performing throughout the region, 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 forward spiritual expansion of his own journey, and truly declares

“like melodies in receptivity
green 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, 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.