Faith Adiele

Faith Adiele was born to a Nigerian father and a Nordic-American mother, and the PBS film My Journey Home documents her travels abroad to find her father and siblings, while the audio and e-book, The Nigerian-Nordic Girl’s Guide to Lady Problems, establishes her tri-cultural POV. Her account of flunking out of Harvard and ordaining as the first black Buddhist nun of Thailand, Meeting Faith (W.W. Norton), received the PEN Open Book Award for Memoir. A popular speaker, storyteller, teacher/mentor and emcee, Adiele has presented at universities, churches and community centers around the world; worked as a diversity trainer and community activist; and taught memoir and travel writing in Bali, Chautauqua, Finland, Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, and Switzerland. Her writings on travel and culture have been widely anthologized.

Named as one of Marie Claire Magazine’s “5 Women to Learn From,” Adiele has been featured on Morning Edition (NPR) with Lynn Neary; in the Huffington Post’s Black History Month celebration; in a television pilot for a reality program and an ad for a national insurance company; on The Tavis Smiley Show; and in a 2-page center spread in Pink Magazine called “A Day in the Life of Faith Adiele”.

A contributor to O: The Oprah Magazine, Yes!, Essence, and Transition, Adiele is co-editor of Coming of Age Around the World: A Multicultural Anthology (The New Press). Other projects include a live PowerPoint story; a signed, limited edition chapbook with a Kenyan graphic artist; The Student Body: A Novel (Random House), a multicultural thriller co-written with 3 college classmates; and 2 middle-school readers on urban Africa (Time Warner). 

Adiele is Associate Professor of Creative Nonfiction at California College of the Arts in the Bay Area and teaches classes through the San Francisco Writers Grotto, VONA/Voices, where she founded the nation’s first workshop for travel writers of color, Esalen, Hedgebrook/Vortex, Left Margin Lit, and others. She serves as a Senior Editor for Panorama: The Journal of Intelligent Travel, and is the founder of African Book Club, a free monthly club promoting contemporary African literature.

Working with Nutopia, a London-based production company, she recently wrote two episodes for A World of Calm, the HBO Max-Calm series designed for relaxation (Mahershala Ali and Kate Winslet, narrators), and turned her trip to the country of Lesotho into a Calm Sleep Story, which Idris Elba narrates. For more, visit her website: https://www.adiele.com/.