Goddard College runs residency programs out of Fort Worden for our MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts and MFA in Creative Writing programs. We want to celebrate the spring 2021 online residency with the Port Townsend community and invite you to a selection of public events. Please contact claudia.zysk@goddard.edu to receive information on how to join these events.
Faith Adiele is the author of two memoirs: The Nigerian-Nordic Girl’s Guide to Lady Problems, a witty, tricultural e/audiobook about black women and fibroids, and Meeting Faith, a travel memoir about becoming Thailand’s first black Buddhist nun (PEN Open Book Award). Faith is also the editor of Coming of Age Around the World: A Multicultural Anthology, and Panorama: The Journal of Intelligent Travel. In addition to her writing life, Faith is also the subject (and the writer and narrator) of the PBS documentary My Journey Home, based on her life growing up with a Nordic-American single mother and then traveling to Nigeria as an adult to find her father and siblings. She is the founder of VONA Travel, the nation's first workshop for travel writers of color, and the African Book Club at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco. Faith has been featured in O: The Oprah Magazine, Marie Claire Magazine’s “5 Women to Learn From,” and The Huffington Post. She has appeared on NPR, and the Tavis Smiley show. She recently wrote two episodes for A World of Calm, the HBO Max-Calm series designed for relaxation, and turned her trip to the country of Lesotho (think Wakanda warrior fashion!) into a Calm Sleep Story, which Idris Elba narrates. After growing up in Washington State, she has lived in West Africa and Southeast Asia, worked as a diversity trainer and community activist, and taught travel writing and memoir from Bali to Ghana to Switzerland. She is Associate Professor of Writing at California College of the Arts and CNF faculty at Stonecoast Low-Residency MFA Program. Faith Adiele’s literary awards include the PEN New England Emerging Writer Award, the Dorothy & Granville Hicks Residency in Literature from the Yaddo Corporation, the Willard R. Espy Literary Foundation Award, Second Prize from the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation, the Millennium Award from Creative Non-Fiction, the John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize from Crab Orchard Review, the UNESCO International Artists Bursary, the PEN Beyond Margins Award for Best Biography/Memoir, and 17 artists’ residencies in Brazil, Canada, Italy and the USA. In Faith’s own words, she is “JUST YOUR TYPICAL NIGERIAN * NORDIC *AMERICAN GIRL WHO WRITES * SPEAKS * TEACHES * TRAVELS (WAS ALSO THAILAND'S FIRST BLACK BUDDHIST NUN.)
Visit her at https://www.adiele.com, on Twitter (@meetingfaith) and/or Instagram (@meetingfaith).