Faith Adiele is the author of Meeting Faith (W.W. Norton & Co.), a travel memoir about becoming Thailand’s first black Buddhist nun. Meeting Faith received the PEN Beyond Margins Award for Best Memoir of 2004.

Adiele is the coeditor of Coming of Age Around the World: A Multicultural Anthology (The New Press) and the writer, narrator, and subject of the PBS documentary My Journey Home, which is based on her (Obama-esque!) life growing up with a Nordic-American single mother and then traveling to Nigeria as an adult to find her father and siblings.

Other projects include The Student Body: A Novel (Random House), a trashy, multicultural thriller cowritten with three Harvard classmates; a signed, limited-edition chapbook with a Kenyan graphic artist; and two middle-school readers on urban Africa for Time Warner.

Adiele has been featured in O, The Oprah Magazine, Marie Claire’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 two-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 16 artist residencies in Brazil, Canada, Italy, and the United States.

Educated at Harvard University, the Nonfiction Writing Program at Iowa, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Adiele has lived in West Africa and Southeast Asia, worked as a diversity trainer and community activist, and taught travel writing, memoir, and creative writing from Bali to Switzerland to Ghana.

She was recently appointed associate professor in CCA's MFA Program in Writing and is finishing up her term as the distinguished visiting writer at Mills College in Oakland, where she is wrapping up Twins: Growing Up Nigerian-Nordic-American, an epic memoir that will complete the story begun in the PBS documentary.

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