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YES,
Faith Adiele is indeed
available
for book clubs, parties and Bar Mitvahs! Though you can never be sure
what color her hair will be ("Continuity, please!" her PBS producer
kept shouting), she is certain to enlighten and entertain with her
high-energy blend of humor and honesty. Despite some notable disasters
(never try to read at a strip mall bookstore
while they're announcing a sale on pumpkin lattes over the
loudspeaker), she loves the road and is a popular speaker, reader, and
teacher.
Faith holds MFAs in
both fiction and nonfiction from
the University of
Iowa, where she studied with James Alan McPherson, Patricia A Foster,
Stuart Dybek, Lan Samantha Chang, Marilynne Robinson and Terry Tempest
Williams. She currently teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in
literary nonfiction at the University of Pittsburgh, with a focus on
memoir, travel writing, the socially-engaged essay, and documentary
narrative (in literature and film). She has taught at the Iowa
Summer
Writing Festival, the Chautaugua Writers Festival, the
Geneva Writers Conference and
Voices of Our
Nations Workshops
for Writers of Color.
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Consider adopting Meeting
Faith or Coming of Age Around
the World for your
high school or university classroom. They fit well with classes in
creative
writing, journaling, memoir, sociology, Africana studies, women's
studies,
anthropology/ethnography, travel literature, coming of age,
international education, or religious studies. The paperback edition of
Meeting Faith includes
an Author's
Statement and reading guide. Detailed introductions to each story in Coming
of Age Around the World provide
historical and cultural context, particularly for Africa and the Muslim
world.
Rationale
& Overview of Coming of Age
Meeting
Faith Brochure & Teaching Tips
See BOOKS for a list of publications and
downloads of Faith's other works available for teaching.
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Faith's writings and
documentary film cover a wide
range of timely
issues suitable
for students and
community groups. Her basic presentation involves a 5-minute clip of
the PBS film, followed by a candid discussion of her journey from
Northwest farm girl, to Ivy League scholarship student drop-out, to
ordination as Thailand's first black Buddhist nun, as well as the
journey from American community activist, to writer prepared to go to
Nigeria under military rule to find her father and siblings. Then,
after a literary reading, Faith likes to engage audiences in
lively discussion. She also offers specialized lectures,
classroom visits, film screenings/discussions and writing
workshops. Often her visits provide the opportunity to build
alliances among diverse groups.
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Though Faith is not a
Buddhist nun (she just plays one
on the tour
circuit), she loves/is terrified by invitations to speak at temples and
sanghas and has written about this for O magazine. A lifelong
Unitarian, she also enjoys speaking at Unitarian
churches and study groups.
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This is a great excuse
to gather your friends
together, with guaranteed
free entertainment! As she's toured across the country, Faith's fab
friends have generously opened their homes and fired up their
fondue pots! After an hour of mingling, Faith explains what led her on
her journey, answers the crowd's eager questions, and describes writing
the book. A reading ends with The Rat Story (a crowd pleaser), and
folks return to merriment and book buying (books usually provided by a
local independent bookstore). When possible, those who buy Meeting
Faith are given complimentary copies of Faith's trashy novel, The
Student Body ('cuz what could be better than the Sacred & the
Profane?).
Another option is to invite Faith to visit your book club (in person or
in the virtual/cyber sense).
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