About the Book
Mentorship Can Change the Course of Your Career
But are you ready to make the most of it?
The right mentor can challenge your thinking, help you recognize opportunities, and share wisdom that takes years to earn. But meaningful mentorship asks something of you, too: the openness to listen, the humility to learn, and the courage to act.
In Upon A Turning Stage, Charisse Lillie draws from the mentors who shaped her and decades spent mentoring others to reveal what makes mentorship meaningful. Through personal stories and hard-earned wisdom, she shows you how to recognize the right guidance, make the most of it, and carry those lessons forward.
What You’ll Discover
Leadership with Integrity for Every Turning Stage
Turn Experience Into Impact
How to turn lessons learned into meaningful leadership that creates opportunities for others to rise.
Build Relationships That Outlast the Role
Discover how mentorship, trust, and authentic relationships shape opportunity, leadership, and lasting legacy.
Recognize the Door Hidden in the Detour
Learn to meet unexpected change with curiosity, preparation, and the courage to pursue a different path.
Move Forward Without Losing Yourself
Pursue your ambitions without compromising your character, using integrity as a source of strength and clarity.
Trust What You Know About Yourself
Hold onto your potential and purpose, even when rejection, doubt, or others' expectations tell you otherwise.
These themes reflect Charisse’s emphasis on owning your truth, remaining open to opportunity, learning throughout life, building relationships, and advancing with substance and ethics.
Being mentored requires more than ambition. It requires the humility to listen and the courage to act on what you learn.
Charisse R. Lille
Meet Charisse Lillie
A Life Shaped by Courage, Leadership, and Integrity
Before Charisse Lillie entered courtrooms and boardrooms, she was a young girl who was told that people who looked like her did not become lawyers. She chose not to let someone else's expectations determine what was possible. That decision would become the beginning of an extraordinary journey.
Charisse went on to serve with the U.S. Department of Justice, become Philadelphia City Solicitor and Chair of the Philadelphia Bar Association, build a groundbreaking career at Ballard Spahr, and hold senior leadership roles at Comcast and the Comcast Foundation. She later chaired the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia and has brought her perspective to the boards of Exelon, Penn Mutual, and Independence Health Group.
Educated at Wesleyan University, Temple University School of Law, and Yale Law School, Charisse has experienced what it means to enter new rooms, navigate pivotal decisions, learn from extraordinary mentors, and eventually become one herself. In Upon A Turning Stage, she opens those experiences to readers, sharing the stories and hard-earned lessons behind the résumé.
Benefiting from a childhood imbued with theatre and the arts, Charisse Lillie’s autobiography delivers rapid-fire scenes from a life of firsts: as a student, law clerk, professor, civil rights attorney, city solicitor, corporate executive, board member and public intellectual. Depicted with lawyerly clarity, myriad accounts of her personal and professional accomplishments provide important insights about some of the most important moments in recent U.S. history. The reader will be inspired by the evidence throughout of her unerring courage and steadfast devotion to justice.
Ruth J. Simmons
President Emerita, Brown University
Upon a Turning Stage is one of those rare memoirs that stays with you long after the last page. Charisse Lillie traces her journey from segregated Houston to the highest ranks of law, corporate leadership, and public service — first African American female City Solicitor of Philadelphia, first woman to chair Ballard Spahr's litigation department, first African American woman to chair the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia's board — yet the book never feels like a résumé. It feels like a hand extended to the reader.
What makes this book exceptional is its honesty: the mentors who opened doors, the setbacks that tested her, the family and faith that carried her through loss and hardship. Her account of Philadelphia's MOVE Commission alone is worth the read. By the final chapter, you understand that her true legacy isn't the titles — it's everyone she lifted along the way.
- Joe Mitchell, Harvard-educated, Street Smart, Estate Planning and Personal Injury Attorney in Greater Philadelphia
Benefiting from a childhood imbued with theatre and the arts, Charisse Lillie’s autobiography delivers rapid-fire scenes from a life of firsts: as a student, law clerk, professor, civil rights attorney, city solicitor, corporate executive, board member and public intellectual. Depicted with lawyerly clarity, myriad accounts of her personal and professional accomplishments provide important insights about some of the most important moments in recent U.S. history. The reader will be inspired by the evidence throughout of her unerring courage and steadfast devotion to justice.
- Ruth J. Simmons, President Emerita, Brown University
An insightful, thoughtful, and intelligent exegesis of how courage, strong moral values, and determination will help one succeed and overcome the obstacles that life throws at you. A worthwhile read.
- David F. Girard-diCarlo, Ambassador to the United States of America to Austria, Ret.
