Poetry & Music
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Long Bio
Cheryl Seely Savage (she/her) was born to Canadian parents and raised in southeastern Idaho. As the oldest of four children, she grew up in a modest and loving home, where she began a deep love affair with literature and music. She later attended Brigham Young University, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in Marriage, Family, & Human Development and a minor in Music.
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Cheryl began writing poetry at the age of seven. Although she won a few awards in high school, she didn't take it seriously for many years. She wrote for her own benefit, maintaining a small blog, writing content for other blogs and websites, and quietly sharing some of her poetry with close friends and family. Shortly after giving birth to her last baby -- while simultaneously approaching her 40th birthday -- Cheryl decided to finally publish her work! Her first collection, Give Me a Fragment: Glimpses into Motherhood, Depression, and Hope was published in 2019. Since then, Cheryl has filled her life with poetry in earnest, creating a space online where she can share her creative journey freely, in addition to publishing two more volumes: Carve a Place for Me and We Have Time. Her next collection, Shadowing, will be released in 2024.
Cheryl is a classically trained professional musician and has a great love for music. She is an accomplished collaborative pianist, performer, and piano teacher. She also has a great passion for travel, being in nature, reading, history, romance, and the relationships she has formed with her husband and children. She is the mother of eight children (yes, eight!) and the struggles of giving birth, motherhood, and body image --coupled with a clinical depression diagnosis in 2008 -- have given Cheryl a deep, personal understanding about the vast emotions surrounding parenthood, mental illness, and the uphill battle of gender equality.
Cheryl has lived throughout the United States (including Idaho, Utah, California, Pennsylvania, and Kansas) and has traveled throughout the world. Each new place has been eye-opening and wonderful, as she discovered quickly how beautiful it is to understand the differences in others and to listen to other points of view. Her decision to embrace the unfamiliar and uncomfortable has helped Cheryl grow in ways that have been invaluable.
All of these things, including a foundational faith in God, have greatly influenced Cheryl's writings. Her vulnerable, unique voice tries to make sense of the world by crafting together her observations using language that is both accessible and poignant. Her poetry moves freely between motherhood, romance, depression, faith, scenes of pilgrimage, and across all vistas of the natural world. Her most recent work, We Have Time, is a collection of love poetry that explores the most universal feelings of romantic love, including both the joys and the heartbreak.
Aside from her three published collections, Cheryl was shortlisted for the 2022 Lascaux Prize in Poetry and has been published in Exponent II and Manhattan Neighbors Magazine. Her work is the focus of A Million Ways, a four movement musical composition trio commissioned by the Égide Duo and composed by Dr. Alyssa Morris. The title and subsequent movements were named after lines and poems found in Cheryl's latest book, We Have Time. The completed composition premiered on July 6, 2023 in Denver, Colorado.
Cheryl, her devoted husband, and their children currently reside in the Flint Hills of Kansas.