Join us for an evening of poetry, prose, and music at Hello Darlin’! As part of our Say Anything/Something program stream, IWC is delighted to be hosting the launch of Rina Garcia Chua’s newest book, A Geography of (Un)Natural Hazards (Sampaguita Press, 2026), featuring local writer Cherie Hanson and our Open Mic!
Entry is a $6 - $10 sliding scale. Doors and Open Mic sign up are at 6:30 pm. For this event, we will have 5 Open mic spots available. Typically, we have a line outside the door so if you’d like to participate, arrive promptly!
Copies of A Geography of (Un)Natural Hazards will be available to purchase at the event.
About the book: From swimming in raging floods, breathing in wildfire smoke, parenting despite distances, narrating in languages carried across oceans, this debut poetry collection imagines a country that resists the bordering of maps. A Geography of (Un)Natural Hazards by Rina Garcia Chua dissolves the line that divides nations and offers instead a terrain shaped by stories of arrivals and survivals:
“there is a taste that lingers; a tongue that retrieves
there is a dream that hosts the Pacific’s horizon; an answer
there is an end to be pursued; another home to be made.”
Drawing on the debris of the archives, social media, and lived experiences, these insurgent poems centre migrant and liminal cultures not as footnotes but as architects of new environments, asking the reader to reconsider where they stand and daring them to listen to the silences that simmer beneath their feet.
About 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 (lands) of the Syilx Okanagan peoples. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of Net awards, and have been previously published in numerous books, magazines, and journals worldwide. Her works are self-reflexive, visual and poetic responses to socio-environmental injustices in liminal migrant cultures.
About Cherie Hanson: Cherie Hanson holds an MA in American Poetry, UBC, Vancouver: as well as, credits toward an MFA in Creative Writing from Western Washington University and Naropa University. In 2001 she attended the Sage Hill Writing Experience with Betsy Warland. Walking the Streets of Blood: Paris Attacks was accepted in 2019 for Vancouver Manuscript Intensive with Elee Kraljii Gardiner. Her writing has appeared in Canadian Women’s Studies; Love Poems for the Media Age, Ripple Effect Press; Erasure Anthology by Naropa University; The Pine Beetle Review; The Wine Country Writer’s Anthology.
Hanson won second place for nonfiction “Stan: Alone in the Attic” in 2021 and honorable mention for “Paris Attacks” 2022 from Wine Country Writers’ Festival. She also won honorable mention for the poem “I Was Standing Over” from the Word on the Lake Writing Contest 2022. In 2023, Black Mountain Press selected a poem for the magazine HerWords. In 2026 her writing appeared in the Anthology We Make the Village and is included in the forth coming Roads to Renewal by Clipson Press. She has written for magazines; for online zines; for the Okanagan Jazz and Blues Society. She has written several plays and a musical which she has produced.
This venue is a honky tonk speakeasy found in BNA Brewing at the top of the stairs and through a convenience store’s pop vending machine. Both food and drink will be available from BNA.
There are gender neutral and shared, multi-stall washrooms and the space is wheelchair accessible. Note: If you need to use the elevator to access this venue, please reach out directly to us through DM!
Our programming is made possible by the City of Kelowna, the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at UBC Okanagan, and BNA Brewery.
We respectfully acknowledge that we live and work in the unceded, ancestral territory of the Syilx people. It is a privilege to be able to put on events as uninvited guests on their land.
Book description courtesy of Sampaguita Press.