~ photo by Peter Dressel

Cheryl Boyce-Taylor is a poet, author, and curator. Cheryl’s verse memoir, Mama Phife Represents, stands as a tribute to her late son, hip hop icon Malik “Phife Dawg” Taylor of A Tribe Called Quest.  Alongside Mama Phife Represents, her four collections of poetry, Raw Air, Night When Moon Follows, Convincing the Body, and Arrival, a finalist for the 2018 Paterson Poetry Award, present a lifetime dedicated to the written word. Cheryl’s latest work, We Are Not Wearing Helmets is scheduled for publication in 2022 by Northwestern University Press. In her community, she has judged poetry entries to The New York Foundation for the Arts and The Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, and facilitated poetry workshops for Cave Canem, Poets & Writers, and The Caribbean Literary and Cultural Center. Her poetry has been commissioned by The Joyce Theater and the National Endowment for the Arts for Ronald K. Brown: Evidence, A Dance Company. A VONA fellow, her work has been published in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, Pluck!, Killings Journal of Arts & Letters, and Adrienne.  The recipient of the 2015 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award, she is the founder and curator of the Calypso Muse and the Glitter Pomegranate Performance Series. Cheryl earned an MFA in Poetry from Stonecoast: The University of Southern Maine, and an MSW from Fordham University. Her life papers and portfolio are stored at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City.