In collaboration with the Okanagan Regional Library (Downtown Branch), Inspired Word Café is thrilled to present a poetry workshop lead by local author Dr. Rina Garcia Chua!
This workshop invites writers at all stages and experience levels to engage in a learning and sharing environment.
No registration necessary—spots are first come, first served. This event is free to attend.
About the workshop: How can the structure of a poem communicate its content?
This workshop, “Dreaming of Marginalia: Writing and Centring the Margins in Shape Poetry,” invites participants to think beyond form, structure, and language by learning the history of concrete poetry and analyzing some examples. By unpacking concrete or shape poetry as both poetic and visual arts, the goal is to settle into the discomfort of unstructuring traditional forms of poetry to communicate an important social, cultural, or environmental issue by challenging what we could create on and advocate for with a blank page.
About Dr. 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 many anthologies, magazines, and journals worldwide. She continues to write poetry that responds to social and environmental injustice in migrant and liminal cultures.
This workshop takes place at the Kelowna Downtown Library in Meeting Room #3 on the first floor (please ask a library staff member if you need help locating the room). This venue is wheelchair accessible and there is free weekend parking in the Library Parkade directly beside the library. There are both gendered stalled washrooms and all-gender/wheelchair accessible washrooms available.
Our programming is made possible by the Okanagan Regional Library, the City of Kelowna, and the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at UBC Okanagan.
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.