Background
Ethnicity:
Her father is French/Abenaki, her mother is French-Canadian.
Mrs. Savageau was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, United States, on April 14, 1950. She is a daughter of Paul Savageau and Cecile Meunier Savageau. She is the oldest of six children. Cheryl Savageau grew up in the Edgemere section of Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, an island neighborhood on Lake Quinsigamond.
Education
Cheryl Savageau attended Calvin Coolidge School and Shrewsbury Jr-Sr High School in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, and graduated from Marian High School in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1968. She earned her Bachelor of Science in English and Philosophy from Clark University in 1978, and has her Master's and is All But Dissertation in English from UMASS, Amherst.
Career
Mrs. 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, Massachusetts, and included poets Christopher Gilbert, John Hodgen, and David Williams.
Cheryl 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.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Sam Cornish: "Savageau is able to create a softness that makes the most realistic social statements seem slick and workmanlike, but the sense of detail is so acute that the reader is grateful that the material is presented this way."