Charliese B. Lewis

I've been in the education field for 28 years, though I've always worked differently than in a traditional classroom setting. From third grade, I knew I had an innate teaching gift, but I always fought actually being a classroom teacher in the traditional setting. After a difficult student teaching experience right before graduation, I went straight into graduate school at The Ohio State University into journalism, which is where the second part of my career began as an avid storyteller. Currently, I work for a local school district as a family and community liaison, where the majority of my work is helping families understand how to support their students with college and career readiness and what's the next step for after high school. This is actually the area I'm focusing my dissertation on. I'm also president of Robert and Charliese Lewis Ministries, where I help first-time authors publish their book babies. I'm the former executive director of Louisville Literary Arts, and I write features for Lexropolis magazine. My background includes being a college and career coach and working in GEAR UP, which assists with college readiness. I was also the inaugural executive director of student support services at Berea College, where I built that program from the ground up. I've done a lot of work in education bringing awareness to college and career readiness, not just for students but for families, because families don't always know what they don't know. I believe we can be more than one thing - we don't have to be just one thing. All the gifts and talents we have, we can use them to pursue purpose in a lot of ways. It's like my two passions - education and literary arts - colliding, allowing me to help other people tell their stories and to coach in a way that's very beneficial to them.