Faith Adiele

AUTHOR of two memoirs:  The Nigerian-Nordic Girl’s Guide to Lady Problems, a witty, tricultural e/audio chapbook about black women and fibroids, and Meeting Faith, a travel memoir about becoming Thailand’s first black Buddhist nun (PEN Open Book Award)

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COLUMNIST: Inaugural travel columnist for DETOUR: Best Stories in Black Travel, syndicated in The Miami Herald and other newspapers. 

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WRITER: 2 Episodes of A World of Calm (HBO-Max and Calm), 4 Sleep Stories for meditation app CALM, and PBS documentary My Journey Home, based on her life growing up with a Nordic-American single mother and then traveling to Nigeria as an adult to find her father and siblings.

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EDITOR: The Decolonial Travel section of PANORAMA: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature and 

Coming of Age Around the World: A Multicultural Anthology, with 24 international stories ideal for the classroom.

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CO-FOUNDER & HOST: VONA Traveling while BIPOC, the nation's first workshop for travel writers of color,, African Book Club at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco and BIPOC Writing Party.

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A popular speaker, teacher, editor, and mentor, Faith has been featured in O: The Oprah Magazine, Marie Claire Magazine’s 5 Women to Learn From, 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. She is the recipient of a UNESCO International Artists Bursary, the Millennium Award from Creative Nonfiction, and 17 artists’ residencies in Brazil, Canada, Italy and the USA.

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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 Associate 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 and The Ruby space for women/NB creatives, and does live storytelling on stage. Her latest manuscript, a multi-genre, multigenerational, multiracial account of 4 generations of her family across 3 continents, is represented by Ayesha Pande.