Cheryl Savageau

Cheryl Savageau is a writer and poet of Abenaki descent. Her father, Paul Savageau is French/Abenaki, her mother, Cecile Meunier Savageau, is French-Canadian.

Savageau is of Abenaki and French descent. She was born at Hahnemann Hospital in Worcester, MA on April 14, 1950. She is the oldest of six children. Savageau grew up in the Edgemere section of Shrewsbury, MA, an island neighborthood on Lake Quinsigamond. Her sense of place is seen in her poetry. Her father died in 1986. Her mother died in 2001.

Savageau attended Calvin Coolidge School and Shrewsbury Jr-Sr High School in Shrewsbury, MA, and graduated from Marian High School in Worcester, MA in 1968. She earned her BS in English and Philosophy from Clark University in 1978, and has her Master's and is ABD in English from UMASS, Amherst.

Savageau's apprenticeship as a poet was with the Worcester Free Peoples Poets and Artists Workshop, started by the poet Etheridge Knight. Outside of academia, the Free Peoples Workshop met in Circe's Bar off the common in Worcester, MA, and included poets Christopher Gilbert, John Hodgen, and David Williams.

Savageau worked briefly as a biology teacher in the early 1980s in central Massachusetts. From the mid-1980s through the early 1990s, she taught poetry in schools throughout Massachusetts through the Massachusetts Artist in Residence program. She has taught creative writing at Clark University, Holy Cross College, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, and in the Goddard MFA program. She is a facilitator in the Osher Life Long Learning Program at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, where she teaches courses in creative writing (poetry and memoir,) storytelling, Native American literature, and Native American Traditional Ecological Knowledge.

Savageau was awarded a Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1993, and from the Massachusetts Artists Fellowship Program 1990. She held three residencies at the MacDowell Colony. Her second book, Dirt Road Home, was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize (1996,) and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

Her children's book, Muskrat Will Be Swimming was a Smithsonian Notable Book,(1996) won the Skipping Stones Award for children's Environmental Books, (1997,) and the Best Children's Book Award (1997), from Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers.

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