Lewis's most recent book is the Los Angeles Times bestseller, The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery (Simon & Schuster), a layered, story-driven investigation of how innovation, discovery, and the creative progress are all spurred on by advantages gleaned from the improbable foundations.
In 2015-16, she was on leave from Harvard as a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library finishing another book on the role of photography in exposing the fiction of racial categories.