Cheryl Wills is an award-winning anchor and reporter for Time Warner Cable’s flagship news network, New York 1 News, based in New York City. She has been with the news channel since its launch in 1992 and the journalist is also the author of Die Free: A Heroic Family History (www.diefreethebook.com) which traces her great-great-great grandfather Sandy Wills courageous service in the Civil War as a member of the United States Colored Troops. Wills is also a popular and engaging public speaker and has appeared before audiences across the country. Cheryl is also a blogger for the internationally renowned The Huffington Post.

As a television journalist, Cheryl Wills has been a reliable guide through everything from the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, to moderating televised discussions about the presidency of Barack Obama. She has received numerous awards for her work including New York Press Club and AP Awards, the YMCA National Black Achievers in Industry Award, and the Carl T. Rowan Leadership in Media Award as part of the 25th annual Martin Luther King Jr. Awards. In 2010, McDonald’s honored Wills as a broadcasting legend during a regional ad campaign. She was awarded an honorary doctorate from New York College of Health Professions in May of 2005.

Her acting work has included playing herself in major motion pictures such as Freedomland, starring Samuel Jackson, and The Brave One, with Jodie Foster and Terrence Howard. Wills is a graduate of the S.I. Newhouse School at Syracuse University, and is an active member of The Inner Circle of City Hall Journalists, The National Association of Black Journalists, The New York Press Club, and The Screen Actors Guild.

Cheryl Wills Report on Tech Saturdays for Harlem Families

 

Die Free: A Heroic Family History
Click to order via Amazon

Hardcover: 222 pages
Publisher: Bascom Hill Publishing Group (January 3, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1935098403
ISBN-13: 978-1935098409

A TV journalist finds the most powerful story in her own family heritage

When award-winning television anchor Cheryl Wills discovers that her great-great-great grandfather, Sandy Wills, was a runaway slave who joined the fight for freedom in the Civil War, she embarks on a search to find out more about the ancestor who demonstrated the same spirit and heart that she knew in her beloved father, a remarkable but flawed man, who died when Cheryl was thirteen, and who never knew his family legacy.

 

 

"My Great-great-great grandfather was not the only one to escape Edmund Wills’ suffocating plantation. So did five young men who were undoubtedly like brothers to him. This is Richard Wills’ enlistment form. He was the only one of the Wills Brothers to die before the war ended. Note that they put his occupation as ‘slave’. Read my book to see what I have to say about that!"

Die Free: A Heroic Family History is also a touching chronicle of the author’s yearning for her father both while he was alive and after his death. Wills asserts, “There’s a comma after that fateful night on the bridge, not a period. There was much more to his life than my dad’s transgressions, spectacular though they were, and his legacy proves that his errors in judgment are but a footnote in an otherwise breathtaking walk on the wild side for the thirty-eight years that Clarence Wills walked this earth.”

From Haywood County, Tennessee, in the 1860s, to New York City in the twentieth century, the unvarnished truth about the Wills’ family roots, ever entwined in passion, music, and faith, is a story full of rich detail and memorable characters. The author reaches back two centuries to provide history and context to a fascinating and vivid picture of an American family, descendents of enslaved Africans who, generation after generation, “reached for the gold.”

 

Related Links

Official Website
http://www.cherylwills.org/

Cheryl Guest Blogs for AALBC.com
Read Moving Piece about Her grandmother:
"Opal's Jim Crow Blues"