Joyce Lewis-Andrews. Author of The Secret-Keepers’ Stories

Joyce Lewis-Andrews has been an avid storyteller and communicator for philanthropic organizations from 1993 to 2021 in roles as Chief Executive Officer, Chief Operating Officer, and Chief Marketing Officer for three Girl Scout Councils in western Pennsylvania and as Executive Director for two private charitable foundations:  McGuire Memorial Foundation and Vincentian Charitable Foundation. Those testimonials, first-hand accounts, and motivating stories increased membership, recruited and retained volunteers, raised awareness, generated more than ten million dollars in philanthropic support, and sold a ton of cookies. During that time, her teams earned several MarCom and PR awards for campaigns and publications in the nonprofit sector.

Professionally and personally, she motivated and mentored hundreds of other storytellers over the years. While at Vincentian, Lewis-Andrews also developed “The Book of Life” program in 2014, inspired by the storytelling of her Grandaunt Clara — connecting nursing home residents and local college volunteers through the art of reminiscence therapy. From 2009 to 2022, she also served as an Executive Service Corps volunteer consultant with the Bayer Center for Nonprofit Management to create impactful content and assist dozens of grassroots and nationally-affiliated organizations with strategic planning, marketing, and governance challenges. In 2011, she authored and published Dancing with a Pink Slip as a guide to rebranding a professional image and ambitions after fifty. She retired from the nonprofit sector in 2021 and began to write this book. 

The prologue of her debut work of creative nonfiction, The Secret-Keepers’ Stories, has been published as The Storyteller’s Prologue with The Northern Appalachia Review, Volume Six - March 2025.

Contact Joyce for more information about The Secret-Keepers’ Stories.

In May 2021, I retired from my nonprofit leadership job with dozens of new ventures and projects in mind. Less than two weeks later, I received a text from my mother’s cousin that our family’s former house on Main Street in the Bloomfield neighborhood of Pittsburgh had burned to the ground. Fortunately, no lives were lost. By then, my Williams-Lewis relatives had all moved out decades ago, yet the emptiness I experienced was as absolute as the gaping hole that now exists between 4120 and 4116 in that stretch of city block. 

Its living room, dining room, and kitchen hosted the joys and sadnesses of over a dozen Christmases and wakes. It was the scene of my grandaunt and her no-good bum husband’s wedding reception, and I imagined it as Ground Zero when my mother’s Deep Dark Secret was revealed. It was the symbol and crowning achievement of my maternal family’s multi-generational struggle out of poverty. Plus, if walls could talk, those would be the ones you’d have liked to spill the beans. Now all that remains is a vacant plot in the shape of something mysteriously gone and it’s hard to imagine how all eleven of them, with their life-sized personalities, managed to squeeze into the outline of that empty footprint. 

What began as a short essay, “Eulogy for the Main Street House,” transformed into the prologue of this book. The remainder of the work took on eleven lives of its own, yet my guiding star was always “What difference would they want a book of their personal stories to make?” 

• They would want their stories to inspire other storytellers.
• They would want the circumstances and situations of their characters to create connections.
• They would want their remembrances and perspectives to represent their most significant achievements: surviving twentieth-century America without letting wars, grudges, or rivalries divide them.

This work, The Secret-Keepers’ Stories, furthers that purpose.

I hope you enjoy my family’s storytelling legacy and are inspired to leave your best stories behind.