Rae Lewis-Thornton

Rae Lewis-Thornton is an Emmy Award-winning AIDS Activist and renowned social justice advocate. She rose to national acclaim when she told her story of living with HIV/AIDS in a cover story for Essence magazine. She has been credited with changing the face of AIDS for Black women in America. The Smithsonian National Museum of African American culture has requested to catalog her groundbreaking Essence Magazine Cover.

For thirty-five years Rae has traveled worldwide in an unending crusade in the fight against HIV/AIDS. As the face of HIV/AIDS, she has been featured in Glamour, O-The Oprah Magazine, Woman’s Day, Essence, Real Health Focus, Jet, Ebony, Emerge, Black Excellence, Heart and Soul, WOE, The Crisis, Poz, Test Positive Award, HIV-Plus, and countless newspaper outlets such as The Washington Post, The Dayton Daily News, The Chicago Tribune, Windy City Times, and The Chicago Sun-Times. Her credits also include many magazine and online articles on health and wellness.

She received an Emmy Award for an ongoing series of first-person reports on her life Living With AIDS for CBS-Chicago. She has been featured on national television news, online shows, and podcasts such as Huffington Post Live, Girl Trek, Divas Simply Singing! with Sheryl Lee Ralph, TV One, The Oprah Winfrey Show, TV One, Nightline, Dateline, WGN Morning News, BET, CNN, HLN News, and The Montel Williams Show. She’s been featured on syndicated radio shows such as Tammi Mac Late Show, Tom Joyner Morning Show, WVON, NPR, and Jamaica’s Breakfast Club.

Rae graduated cum laude from Northeastern Illinois University. She attended McCormick Theological Seminary on a Merit Scholarship and earned her Master of Divinity degree. She received the Arthur Hayes Fellowship in Church History from McCormick upon graduating. She completed two years of Ph.D. course work in Church History, at the Lutheran School of Theology-Chicago. Rae is currently in the Doctorate of Ministry Program at the Methodist Theological School of Ohio, In 2022. Rae was linseed as a minster in 2001, by Revered Clay Evans-Chicago and is an ordained minister. Rae is proud to have been a guest of President Joseph Biden at the White House observances of World AIDS Day. 2021.

Rae has published three books, The Politics of Respectability, Amazing Grace: Letters Along My Journey, and her Amazon Best Seller, Unprotected: A Memoir. She is working on a new book, What I Learned From Digging In Dirt.