Cheryl Foggo grew up in Calgary’s Bowness neighbourhood listening to her mother’s siblings act out family stories in the living room, a tradition that planted the seed for a career spent recovering stories others had left untold. Over four decades of books, films, and plays, the Calgary writer and filmmaker has documented the Black pioneers who settled the Prairies more than a century ago, work that led to her induction into the Alberta Order of Excellence in 2022.
A Family Rooted in the 1910 Black Migration
Cheryl Dawn Foggo was born in Calgary in 1956, the third of six children raised by Roy, a mailman, and Pauline, who worked as a library assistant for the Calgary Board of Education. Cheryl is a descendant of the roughly 1,500 African Americans who fled the southern United States in the Black Migration of 1910, and both sets of her maternal great-grandparents made that journey, settling near Maidstone, Saskatchewan. After graduating from Bowness High School, Cheryl worked as a dental assistant for a decade while writing freelance articles on the side, including an early piece on Calgary’s Black community that Calgary Magazine agreed to publish when other outlets shied away from the subject.
From Pourin’ Down Rain to the Screen
In 1990, Cheryl published Pourin’ Down Rain, an autobiography tracing five generations of her family from enslavement in the United States to the community they built on the Canadian Prairies, a book that became a finalist for the Alberta Culture Non-Fiction Award. Her 1997 young adult novel One Thing That’s True was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award, and she went on to write additional books for young readers, including I Have Been in Danger and Dear Baobab. Her introduction to screenwriting came through CBC workshops in the late 1980s, leading to Carol’s Mirror, an award-winning National Film Board short she co-wrote with her husband, playwright Clem Martini, whom she married in 1984 and with whom she has two daughters.
Reclaiming the Story of John Ware
Cheryl’s best known work centres on John Ware, a Black cowboy whose descendants were elders in her own community when she was a child. She spent decades researching his life, first for the play John Ware Reimagined, staged in Edmonton and Blyth, Ontario, and later for the National Film Board documentary John Ware Reclaimed, which premiered at the Calgary International Film Festival in 2020 and won the CTV Alberta Feature Audience Choice Award, as detailed in her Alberta Order of Excellence profile. The film corrects long-standing inaccuracies about Ware’s life while also portraying the love he shared with his wife and children, a balance Cheryl says was important to her from the start.
Passing the Story Forward
Beyond her own books and films, Cheryl served on the advisory board for CBC’s Black on the Prairies and volunteers as Historian in Residence with the Calgary Black Chambers. She received the national Harry Jerome Award for the Arts in 2008 and the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Distinguished Artist Award in 2021, and in 2022 she received the Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Medal (Alberta) alongside her Alberta Order of Excellence induction. Cheryl and Clem live in Calgary, where they spend time with their two grandchildren.
How much of your own province’s history is still waiting for someone to tell it?
