Meet Faith
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FAITH ADIELE, the daughter of a Nordic-American single mother and absent Nigerian politico father, was raised as the sole Black girl in a small farming community in Washington State and attended Harvard on scholarship.  (Friends call her The Female Barack Obama.)

After flunking out of Harvard, Adiele shaved her head and moved into the forests of Southeast Asia, not realizing she had chosen a rigorous Forest Temple with a vow of silence, a single daily meal and a goal of 19 hours of daily mindfulness. Despite never having meditated before, she became the first black Buddhist nun of Thailand. Her memoir about this experience, Meeting Faith (W.W. Norton & Co.), received the PEN Beyond Margins Award for Best Memoir of 2005 and a Publishers Weekly starred review credited it with "a comic's timing, a novelist's keen observations about human idiosyncrasies and an anthropologist's sensitivity to race and culture."

After defrocking and graduating college, Adiele traveled to West Africa, where she met her father — originally thought killed in the Nigerian civil war — for the first time.  She also learned that she — an only child for 26 years — had siblings, including a sister who resembled her so much that villagers mistook Faith for a ghost from the spirit world.  A second trip to Nigeria, 12 years after the first, inspired the PBS documentary "My Journey Home," produced by award-winning filmmaker Renee Tajima-Peña and written and narrated by Adiele.  (This was followed by a trip to Sweden and Finland, where once again Adiele found herself welcomed into a village by long-lost family.) 

Adiele’s work, called both “luminous” (O Magazine) and “remarkable” (Book-of-the-Month Club), has been widely published and anthologized, credited with “[reaching] into the expanding geography of black women’s experiences” (Belles Lettres).  Her honors/fellowships include a UNESCO International Artists Bursary (Italy); Best American Essays shortlist; the Banff Centre for the Arts (Canada); the Sacatar Foundation (Brasil); the Yaddo Corporation; the MacDowell Colony; Djerassi Artists Resident Program; the Millennium Award from Creative Nonfiction; the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation; and PEN New England.

Her other books include The Student Body (Random House/Villard Books), a satirical thriller co-written with three college pals and chosen as one of Cosmo’s Top 10 Beach Reads of 1998 and the international anthology, Coming of Age Around the World (The New Press).

A graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Nonfiction Writing Program, Adiele has lived in West Africa and Southeast Asia and worked as a community activist and diversity trainer.  She currently resides in Pittsburgh, where she is Assistant Professor of Creative Nonfiction at the University of Pittsburgh.  She is at work on Twins: Growing Up Nigerian/Nordic/American, a memoir and cultural history that will complete the story begun in the documentary film. 


 
 
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Photo credit: Scott Sester