Ayin M. Adams, a native New Yorker, began writing poetry at age five and selling them on her street corner in Brooklyn for 25 cents. She is winner of the Pat Parker Memorial Poetry Prize, the Audre Lorde Memorial Prose Prize, nominated as Poet of the Year, winner of the President’s Award For Literary Excellence, grant winner of the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Award, and winner of Sparrow Grass Publishing.
Adams is published in anthology Defjampoetry “Bum Rush The Page” 2004 top ten finalist in the Rap-It-Up BASS film competition sponsored by BET.com and Blackaids.org Foundation. 2008 Teacher of The Year Winner by the International Peace Poem. Ayin Adams holds a Ph.D. in Human Services and a Ph.D. in Metaphysics. African Americans in Hawai`i: A Search for Identity explores some of the dilemmas of identity and conflict in a place where Blacks are only 3.5% of the population. Unfortunately, the local media and education system have ignored, controlled, and/or marginalized blacks in local history. Thus images and perceptions of blacks in Hawai`i have been controlled or omitted, intentionally or by default or ignorance, thereby preserving the dominant American status, culture, and control of power and assimilation. Historically, identity and status in America, Hawai`i, and the world have been based on the privilege of skin color for too long.