
The author and scholar, Rina Garcia Chua, in the Kasugai Japanese Gardens in Kelowna, BC.

Rina during the Shadbolt Fellows Launch in SFU Harbour Centre. Her co-fellows are Wanda John-Kehewin, Andy Hoff, and Mercedes Eng.


The author and scholar, Rina Garcia Chua, in the Kasugai Japanese Gardens in Kelowna, BC.
RINA GARCIA CHUA
Rina Garcia Chua (she/her/siya) is a creative and critical scholar from the Philippines who is currently based in unceded tm̓xʷúlaʔxʷ of the syilx / Okanagan peoples. She was a 2022-2023 Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellow in the Humanities at Simon Fraser University, a 2023 Environmental Humanities Institute Fellow at Dartmouth, and she received her PhD from the University of British Columbia, where she is now a Research Associate in Environmental Humanities and Migrant Ecologies. Rina's master’s thesis received the “Outstanding Thesis” Award from the De La Salle University–Manila and she is the editor of the first anthology of Philippine ecopoetry, Sustaining the Archipelago (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2018). The anthology was nominated for the Philippine National Book Award for Best Anthology in English. Her scholarship includes recently published essays in Canadian Literature, Close Reading in the Anthropocene (Routledge), Environment and Pedagogy in Higher Education (Lexington Books), The Journal of Southeast Asian Ecocriticism, Katipunan, Likhaan, Green Letters – Studies in Ecocriticism, AKDA: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, and Performance, Asia-Pacific Social Science Review, Tómas Literary Journal, and Kritika Kultura.
She also published creative works (poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction) in Philippine and international journals, newspapers, and magazines; her recent creative publications can be read in World Literature Today, The Global South, g u e s t, Environmental History Now, The Hopper, Aster(ix), among others. She is a co-editor of the anthology, Empire and Environment: Ecological Ruin in the Transpacific, with Jeffrey Santa Ana, Heidi Amin-Hong, and Xiaojing Zhou (University of Michigan Press, 2022). Chua is also the co-editor of The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada and is an Associate Editor of Environmental Humanities.
Chua's current book manuscript develops the framework of a migrant reading practice in analyzing curations, collations, and anthologies of literary and visual cultures, and she is completing her poetry collection, “A Geography of (Un)Natural Hazards,” which is a visual and poetic response to migrant and arrivant cultures, liminal environments, and violences of form and language.
Watch Rina perform four of her poems from the in-progress poetry collection, "A Geography of (Un)Natural Hazards," at Word Vancouver 2023.
Explore"Fragmenting the West Coast," Rina's Shadbolt Fellowship Project, in collaboration with the Digital Humanities Innovation Lab at SFU.
Recent and Relevant Publications
All photos used in this website are from Rina's personal collection.