Writer Cheryl Savageau is the author of Out of the Crazywoods, a mixed-genre memoir that navigates her experience of living with bipolar/manic depressive illness; and three collections of poetry - Mother/Land, an “unhistory” of the Northeast; Dirt Road Home, which was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize; and Home Country.
She has won Fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Artists Fellowship Program. Her work is widely anthologized, most recently in Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology and Dawnland Voices: An Anthology of Indigenous Writing from New England. Her children’s book, Muskrat Will Be Swimming, was a Smithsonian Notable Book.
While at MacDowell, she worked on two new collections of poetry, The Language of Water, which begins in the waterways of the Dawnland (New England) and extends metaphorically into the streams of experience that create our own personal landscapes; and New Love/Old Love, about love and reconciliation during COVID, the transformation of old ways of loving, the re-discovery of love and sex at 70, and the tensions of living during COVID, teetering between terror and bliss. She also explored combining poetry with music/song as another component of the work she’s been doing with poetry and textiles, which will culminate sometime in the future in a multi-media exhibit.
