Readings 2012

FAITH ADIELE is the author of Meeting Faith (W.W. Norton), a travel memoir about becoming Thailand’s first black Buddhist nun, which received the PEN Beyond Margins Award for Best Memoir of 2004. 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.” She is also lead editor of the international collection, Coming of Age Around the World: A Multicultural Anthology (The New Press, 2008), and writer/narrator/subject of the PBS documentary My Journey Home. The film documents Adiele’s experiences—similar to President Obama’s— growing up with a Nordic-American single mother and traveling to Nigeria as an adult to find her father and siblings.

Educated at Harvard University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Adiele has taught in the Creative Nonfiction MFA Program at the University of Pittsburgh, held the Christa Corrigan McAuliffe Chair at Framingham State College, and served as Rachel B. Noel Distinguished Visiting Professor at Metropolitan State College; she is presently the Distinguished Visiting Writer at Mills College in Oakland, California. Adiele has published or been featured in such periodicals as O magazine, Ploughshares, Marie Claire, Creative Nonfiction, Essence, Transition, Pink magazine, Tricycle, The Root.com, and in numerous anthologies. The recipient of a UNESCO International Artists Bursary, two Best American Essays shortlists, and the Millennium Award from Creative NonfictionTwins: Growing Up Nigerian/Nordic/American, a social/cultural memoir that will complete the story begun in the PBS documentary. Visit her at www.adiele.com.