Faith Adiele

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FAITH ADIELE is author of Meeting Faith, which won a PEN memoir award, PBS documentary My Journey Home, and 3 chapbooks about being Nigerian | Nordic | American. She hosts African Book Club and has written for HBO, Calm, OkayAfrica, Oprah Magazine, Essence, Smithsonian, Hyperallergic, Detour and Miami Herald.

 

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FAITH ADIELE is author of Meeting Faith, an award-winning account of becoming Thailand’s first Black Buddhist nun, and The Nigerian Nordic Girl’s Guide to Lady Problems. Her media credits include A World of Calm (HBO-Max), Sleep Stories (Calm App), documentary My Journey Home (PBS) about finding her family in Nigeria, and a travel column in Detour and Miami Herald. She co-founded the nation’s first writing workshop for BIPOC travelers and African Book Club at the Museum of the African Diaspora. One of Marie Claire Magazine’s “Five Women to Learn From,” Faith Chairs Writing & Literature at California College of the Arts.

 

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OTHER FUN FACTS (NOT FOR THE OFFICIAL BIO!)

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A popular storyteller, speaker, teacher, editor, and mentor, Faith has been featured in O: The Oprah Magazine, Marie Claire Magazine, and The Huffington Post. She has appeared on NPR, on the Tavis Smiley show, in a national television ad for TIAA-CREF, in the pilot for a new reality show, and in a 2-page spread: “A Day in the Life of Faith Adiele” for Pink Magazine.

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Her memoir Meeting Faith is widely taught in American universities and routinely makes travel listicles. She is profiled in the new study Lifting as They Climb: Black Women Buddhists and Collective Liberation and in Spelman College's Garden Initiative for Black Women’s Religious Activism, a roster of activists who work for social change through or with religion.

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She is co-editor of Coming of Age around the World: A Multicultural Anthology, and her journalism has been recognized by the Los Angeles and San Francisco Press Clubs. Recipient of a UNESCO International Artists Bursary, the PEN Open Book Award, the Millennium Award from Creative Nonfiction, Faith has been awarded 20+ artists’ residencies around the world.

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Educated at Harvard University, the Nonfiction Writing Program at Iowa, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Faith has lived in West Africa and Southeast Asia, worked as a diversity trainer and community activist, and taught travel writing and memoir from Bali to Ghana to Switzerland. She is Chair and Professor of Writing at California College of the Arts and CNF faculty at Stonecoast Low-Residency MFA Program.

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Faith lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she is a member of the San Francisco Writers' Grotto, Groundfloor Social Club, and The Ruby space for women/NB creatives and does live storytelling on stage. She is represented by Ayesha Pande and has books forthcoming from Columbia University Press and Texas Review Press.