Raised in Kentucky and Hawai’i, Maile is a Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) graduate student in Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego. Her poems and essays are published in two chapbooks by Kearny Street Workshop: Same Place, Same Time (2006) and 12 Ways: an anthology of the Intergenerational Writer’s Lab (2007).
This blog is a project that often gets left behind in the midst of many others. It is a mix of writing about academics from the standpoint of someone in an interdisciplinary Ethnic Studies program, Kanaka Maoli political issues, and creative writing.
Elmaz Abinader’s 2007 workshop in Political Content at VONA (Voices of Our Nations) gave life to all of these passions, perhaps summed up best by Zora Neale Hurston:
I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes…. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world- I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.
-Zora Neale Hurston, How it Feels To Be A Colored Me
Maile Arvin blogs here. She is a graduate student in Ethnic Studies living in Southern California. She likes coffee and poems.
