Cheryl Foggo BIOGRAPHY

 

Cheryl Foggo of Calgary is an award-winning Canadian storyteller. She embraces various forms of narrative – journalism, books, film, television and theatre – to tell compelling stories of Alberta’s Black pioneers. By shining a light on the Prairies’ rich and diverse Black history, she helps us understand the relevance of this history to our lives, and the significance of contributions by Black people to Canada.

Cheryl Dawn Foggo was born in 1956 in Calgary and raised in Bowness. Her father Roy was a mailman and her mother Pauline worked for the Calgary Board of Education as a library assistant. Cheryl is a descendant of the Black Migration of 1910, when approximately 1,500 African Americans fled hatred in the southern United States. Both sets of her maternal great grandparents joined that migration, travelling from Oklahoma to settle near Maidstone, Saskatchewan.

Profiled in Who’s Who in Black Canada, Cheryl has received public and critical acclaim, and garnered multiple awards over the decades, including the 2008 national Harry Jerome Award for The Arts. She received the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Distinguished Artist Award in 2021. In 2022, Cheryl received the Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee Medal (Alberta).