FAITH ADIELE
| Meet Faith |
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FOR P.R. USE –DOWNLOAD THIS OFFICIAL BIO The daughter of a Nordic-American single mother and absent Nigerian politico father, I was raised as the sole African girl in a small farming community in Washington State and attended Harvard on scholarship. (Yes, I was Barack Obama before he was!) After flunking out of Harvard, I shaved my head and moved into the forests of Southeast Asia, not realizing I'd chosen to ordain in a rigorous Forest Temple, meaning, a vow of silence, a single daily meal and a goal of 19 hours of daily mindfulness. Despite never having meditated before, I became the first black Buddhist nun of Thailand. My memoir about this experience, Meeting Faith (W.W. Norton & Co.), received the 2005 PEN Beyond Margins Award for Best Memoir (of 2004) and a Publishers Weekly starred review credited it with "a comic's timing, a novelist's keen observations about human idiosyncrasies and an anthropologist's sensitivity to race and culture" (who knew?). After defrocking and graduating college, I traveled to West Africa, where I met my father—originally thought killed in the Nigerian civil war—for the first time. I also learned that I—an only child for 26 years—had siblings, including a sister who resembled me so much that villagers mistook me for a ghost from the spirit world. A second trip to Nigeria inspired the PBS documentary "My Journey Home," produced by award-winning filmmaker Renee Tajima-Peña and written and narrated by me. (This was followed by a trip to Sweden and Finland, where once again I found myself welcomed into a village by long-lost family.) My work, called both “luminous” (O Magazine) and “remarkable” (Book-of-the-Month Club), has been widely published and anthologized, credited with “[reaching] into the expanding geography of black women’s experiences” (Belles Lettres). Honors/fellowships include a UNESCO International Artists Bursary (Italy); Best American Essays shortlist; the Banff Centre for the Arts (Canada); The Sacatar Foundation (Brasil); the Yaddo Corporation; the MacDowell Colony; The Millennium Award from Creative Nonfiction; Djerassi Artists Resident Program; the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation; and PEN New England. Other books include The Student Body (Random House/Villard Books), a satirical thriller co-written with three college pals and chosen as one of Cosmo’s Top 10 Beach Reads of 1998 and the international anthology, Coming of Age Around the World (The New Press). A graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Nonfiction Writing Program, I have lived in West Africa and Southeast Asia and worked as a community activist and diversity trainer. After teaching writing all over the world, I am now settled in Oakland, California, where I am serving as the Distinguished Visiting Writer at Mills College and hard at work (kinda) on Twins: Growing Up Nigerian/Nordic/American, a memoir and cultural history that will complete the story begun in the documentary film. |
Photo credit: Scott Sester
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