UBC Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections, in partnership with Word Vancouver, is proud to facilitate a session with two poets whose work responds to archival materials in our holdings. Rina Garcia Chua will perform three poems from her upcoming poetry chapbook, “A Geography of (Un)Natural Hazards.” These pieces are poetic responses to the Jim Wong-Chu fonds and the Chinese Canadian Research Collection at the UBC Vancouver’s Rare Books & Special Collections archives. They are visual and aural poems that embody the counternarratives of migrant labour, migration, and environmental extraction that resists and negates Canadian “multiculturalism.” Rina’s work thinks through where and when these counter narratives emerge from. It also shows how these are cathartic affects of her time researching in the archives with materials that force her to confront the reality of being and existing in a nation conceptualized through the symbolic and material violences against racialized and minority communities. Carolyn Nakagawa will share a poem sequence inspired by letters from the Joan Gillis fonds, written by teenaged Japanese Canadians to their former classmate Joan after their forced uprooting from the British Columbia coast in 1942. Nakagawa both quotes and paraphrases from the archival letters, separating out unique authors’ voices before weaving them together to listen to both the individual and shared experiences of young people yearning for friendship, normalcy, and home.
Location: Theatre, UBC Robson Square
Hybrid events are held in person, you will also be able to watch it live streamed from our Youtube channel.
Type: Panel
Sponsored by Rare Books and Special Collections, UBC Library
Moderator: Krisztina Laszlo
Panelists: Rina Garcia Chua, A Geography of (Un)Natural Hazards · Carolyn Nakagawa
About The Moderator
Krisztina Laszlo is an Archivist at Rare Books and Special Collections, UBC Library.
About The Panelists
Rina Garcia Chua is a Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellow in the Humanities at Simon Fraser University and she received her PhD from the University of British Columbia. She is the editor of Sustaining the Archipelago: An Anthology of Philippine Ecopoetry (UST Publishing House, 2018), and co-editor of Empire and Environment: Ecological Ruin in the Transpacific (University of Michigan Press, 2022). She is completing her poetry chapbook, “A Geography of (Un)Natural Hazards,” which is a visual and poetic response to cultures and environments.
Carolyn Nakagawa is a fourth-generation Anglo-Japanese Canadian poet, playwright, and educator who makes her home in the territory colonized as Vancouver, BC. Her work addresses themes such as the nuances of identity in collective contexts, and history’s continuing impact on the present. Nakagawa’s poems have appeared in publications such as The Malahat Review, CV2, and The New Quarterly, and she has read her work at Powell Street Festival and Heart of the City Festival. Her plays have been presented by Vancouver Asian Canadian Theatre and Ruby Slippers Theatre. She holds an honours degree in English Literature and Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies from the University of British Columbia.
