Cheryl received Writers’ Guild Awards for her work on the daytime dramatic serials As the World Turns and Days of Our Lives, and has recently been nominated for a Daytime Emmy Award for Days (she was also nominated for As the World Turns). She writes for Law & Order: SVU on a freelance basis, and her episode “Garland’s Baptism by Fire” is available on Peacock On Demand. Her short play Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep streamed as part of #WhileWeBreathe and received a write-up in the New York Times.
Cheryl received the Ed Kleban Award for her work as a musical theater librettist, and her musical Barnstormer, written with award-winning composer Douglas J. Cohen, received a Jonathan Larson Performing Arts Foundation Award under the auspices of the Lark Play Development Center. Her play Maid’s Door was produced at the Billie Holiday Theatre, received seven Audelco Awards, and was presented at the 2015 and 2017 National Black Theatre Festivals, and was published in Holy Ground: The National Black Theatre Festival Anthology. Her musical Bridges was commissioned and produced by the Berkeley Playhouse and received great reviews, including from the San Francisco Examiner; it was a finalist for the 2018 Richard Rodgers Award. Don’t Stay Safe, the short film musical based on Bridges, was nominated for a Drama Desk Award and screened and won awards in several film festivals. She is the co-librettist for a new version of Scott Joplin’s opera Treemonisha, received its world premiere in Toronto in June 2023 to great reviews (including a writeup in the New York Times).
Cheryl’s play about the desegregation of the nation’s school system, The Color of Justice, which was commissioned by Theatreworks/USA, received excellent reviews in the New York Times and Daily News, and toured for a number of years. Her play Winnie the Pooh KIDS was commissioned and is currently licensed by the Disney Theatrical Group. Her play Cover Girls, which is an adaptation of the Bishop T. D. Jakes novel, was produced and toured by ClearChannel Entertainment. She has written commissions for the Ensemble Studio Theatre/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Science and Technology Project, the Red Mountain Theatre Company (Mandela and The MLK Project), and the Birmingham Children’s Theatre (Tuxedo Junction, about Alabama Jazz musician Erskine Hawkins).
Cheryl is a librettist and lyricist and is an alumna of the Advanced Workshop of the BMI/Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop. She has a degree in English and a Certificate in Theatre and Dance from Princeton University and has studied playwriting with Jean-Claude Van Itallie and Jeffrey Sweet. She is a former Dramatists Guild Fellow, having been mentored by playwright/librettist Alfred Uhry. She is a member of the Dramatists Guild and a Board member of the Dramatists Legal Defense Fund.
She received her J.D. from Columbia University School of Law and her M.S.J. from the Columbia University School of Journalism. She is a practicing attorney in Manhattan and is the General Counsel for the Authors Guild.