A life is more than
its hardest chapters.
I’ve spent much of my life helping others find the words. Writing this book meant finding my own voice.
Shadows of Sobriety grew from memories I carried for decades: a childhood shaped by my father’s alcoholism, the silences in our home, and questions about the people I loved.
Finding words for what
we carried in silence.
Growing up, I learned how to keep things to myself. Writing this memoir meant returning to the memories, asking difficult questions, and beginning to understand how my family’s history had shaped my own life.
It also meant making room for more than pain. My story holds faith, gratitude, love, and the people who offered kindness when I needed it. Those parts belong here, too.
Faith, family, and the
work of understanding.
My Christian faith is central to how I understand my life. Through Scripture, community, and the people who walked beside me, I found a way to begin facing what I had carried.
I’m still reflecting on what it means to forgive, to listen, and to live with an honest understanding of the past. I share these stories in the hope that you might recognize something of your own experience and feel less alone.
My professional background
Keith is recognized as one of the world’s leading global strategists in employee engagement, internal communication, and executive communication. He formed Grayson Emmett Partners in 2014. In 2020, he joined Derwent Advisory as Managing Partner. Derwent is an international consultancy with a presence in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, London, Amsterdam, and Kuala Lumpur.
Prior to creating his consultancy, he was a Partner with Brunswick Group, New York and London, and led a global group of practitioners focused exclusively on improving organizational performance by building employee trust, advancing internal communication as a strategic discipline, and helping drive change at many of the world’s leading corporations.
Keith founded and served as President of Insidedge, a leading employee communication consultancy supporting major agencies in the Interpublic Group (IPG) of Companies, from 1991 until 2013. He also served as a senior executive leader with Golin, Hill+Knowlton Strategies, and Ketchum earlier in his career.
During his professional career, Keith has worked with companies in virtually every major industry sector and served such clients as Amazon, American Airlines, Covidien, Darden Restaurants, Facebook, FedEx, GlaxoSmithKline, Tenneco, Georgia-Pacific Corp., IBM Corp., Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Johnson & Johnson, NASA, National Bank of Abu Dhabi (NBAD), NATO, Tenneco, Tyson Foods, and Visa International.
Keith was an Algur H. Meadows Fellow at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas, where he earned a master of fine arts degree in mass communication and a bachelor of fine arts in journalism.
During his graduate fellowship, he developed and co-produced Dax’s Case, an award-winning documentary centering on the complex legal, medical, and ethical decisions that emerged when an East Texas man, Donald “Dax” Cowart, was severely burned in a tragic propane gas pipeline explosion. Cowart maintained that he should have been allowed to refuse the medical treatments that sustained his life, to go home and die. Later, he earned a law degree, became a practicing attorney, and a passionate advocate for individual rights before dying of cancer at age 71 in April 2019 — 46 years after his accident. Dax’s Case, which was funded by grants from Concern for Dying, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Texas Committee for the Humanities, was honored in 1985 with the American Film Institute’s Silver Award for documentary films.
Keith is past Chair and Emeritus Board Member of The Plank Center for Leadership in Public Relations at The University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. He also serves on the board of the International Public Relations Research Conference (IPRRC) and has been executive-in-residence in the Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) program at the Medill School, Northwestern University, in Evanston, Ill. He lectures regularly at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, the College of Communication and Information Sciences at the University of Alabama, and the Public Relations and Advertising (PRAD) Program at DePaul University.
Some stories take a lifetime to tell.
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