Faith Adiele

Travel Writer, Memoirist, and Decolonial Activist

Oakland, California

Summer 2023

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Contact Info

Website: www.adiele.com

Instagram: @meetingfaith

BIOGRAPHY

Faith Adiele is a travel memoirist, essayist, editor, critic, storyteller, and host of African Book Club at San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora. She founded the USA’s first writing workshop for travelers of color and writes a weekly column for DETOUR and The Miami Herald. Her media credits include a PBS documentary about finding her family in Nigeria, two episodes of A World of Calm (HBO-Max), and Sleep Stories for the Calm meditation app. Her memoirs include Meeting Faith, an account of becoming Thailand’s first Black Buddhist nun that won the PEN Open Book Award and is widely taught in American universities, and several experimental chapbooks about her Nigerian-Nordic-American heritage. She is co-editor of Coming of Age Around the World: A Multicultural Anthology, and her essays appear in OkayAfrica, O: The Oprah Magazine, Essence, Smithsonian Folklife, Hyperallergic, Panorama (the UK-based journal where she is a senior editor) and numerous anthologies.

Named one of Marie Claire magazine’s “Five Women to Learn From,” Faith speaks around the world and teaches at California College of the Arts. Travel Writing Will Save the World, her forthcoming book from Columbia University Press, will be the USA’s first decolonial travel craft book.

PROJECT

While at Nawat Fes, Faith will work on projects rooted in her Nigerian/Nordic/American heritage and her practice as a travel writer, editor and teacher. She is completing a decolonial travel writing craft book inspired by her travel stories, scholarly activism to desegregate and decolonize travel publishing, and experience founding the USA’s first travel writing workshop for global majority people. She hopes that the manuscript—the first of its kind in the USA—will benefit from community conversations about Morocco’s historic impact on travel literature, the legacy of French colonial heritage in physical and intellectual space, and the role of travel writing on Western perceptions of North Africa and the Arab-Muslim world. She plans to offer travel writing workshops and is collaborating with UK-based publication Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature, where she edits a section on Decolonising Travel, and Detour: The Best Black Travel Stories, where she is the inaugural columnist, to capture these conversations and local travel writing.