Faith Adiele

Faith Adiele is the author of Meeting Faith, a dual narrative about becoming Thailand’s first Black Buddhist Nun that won the PEN Open Book Award for Memoir, routinely makes Best Of listicles, and is widely taught in American universities. She has also published four experimental chapbooks about her Nigerian-Nordic-American heritage — the audio/e-book, The Nigerian-Nordic Girl’s Guide to Lady Problems, a collaboration with a Kenyan graphic artist, and recently, two hybrid, speculative memoirs: Her Voice: Hänen Äänensä: A Hybrid Memoir and Voice/Over: A Memoir Breakout in 7 Movies.

Her media credits include My Journey Home (a PBS documentary about finding her father and siblings in Nigeria), two episodes of HBO-Max’s A World of Calm (narrated by Mahershala Ali and Kate Winslet), and Sleep Stories for the Calm meditation app. Faith is co-editor of Coming of Age Around the World: A Multicultural Anthology, and her essays appear in anthologies and such periodicals as O: The Oprah Magazine, Essence, OkayAfrica, The Offing, Smithsonian Folklife, and Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place & Nature, for which she is Senior Editor of Decolonial Travel.

Faith founded the nation’s first writing workshop for travelers of color and the African Book Club at San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora. Named one of Marie Claire magazine’s “Five Women to Learn From,” she chairs the Writing & Literature Program at California College of the Arts in San Francisco and speaks, teaches, and holds residencies around the world.

Since coming to Stonecoast, Faith has piloted numerous elective workshops like Speculative Nonfiction; The Unworkshop: Mindful, Cross-Genre Community; and Travel Writing to Save the World. Her popular seminars in rotation include ROOTING: New BIPOC Nature Writing; Writing the Body’s Trauma without (Re)Traumatizing Your Reader; Surprising Readers & Ourselves: Playing with (Hermit) Crabs; Vibrant Morsels: Writing the Senses; When We Can’t Be Ourselves: The Literature of Passing; and Beyond Pyramids & Arcs: Non-Traditional Structures. Her co-taught courses include Multiracial Writing; Adaptation; and most recently, Collage, Micro-Prose, Poem & Experiment: A Hybrid Chapbooks Lab and Cross-Genre Mythology Workshop, both with Raina Léon.