05/15/2026
Cheryl has received three Writer’s Guild Awards for her work on the daytime dramatic serials “As the World Turns” and “Days of Our Lives,” and is currently on the writing team for “Beyond the Gates,” the first new network soap in decades. She was also nominated for a Daytime Emmy Award for Days, as well as for “As the World Turns.” She has written for “Law & Order: SVU” 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 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 as a Best Classical Music Performance of 2023); it was recently nominated for 11 Dora Mavor Moore Awards in the Opera Category.
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.
Read more about her work on the Axial website or at https://cldplay.com/ and follow her at
Welcome Cheryl!!
