The Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellows in the Humanities

Mercedes Eng is the author of Mercenary English, a poem about sex work, violence, and resistance in the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood of Vancouver, Prison Industrial Complex Explodes, winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, and my yt mama, which documents a childhood lived under white supremacy in Canadian prairies. Her writing has appeared in Hustling Verse: An Anthology of Sex Workers’ Poetry, Jacket 2, Asian American Literary Review, The Capilano Review, The Abolitionist, r/ally (No One Is Illegal), and Survaillance and M’aidez (Press Release). Mercedes teaches at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, where she also organizes the On Edge reading series, and is currently SFU Department of English's Ellen and Warren Tallman writer-in-residence. She is dreaming and planting towards the destruction of carceral systems.

Mercedes' term as a Shadbolt Fellow runs from January to August 2023. 

Host department: Department of English 

Rina Garcia Chua completed her PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of British Columbia Okanagan, with research interests in the environmental humanities, Asian Canadian/Asian American literatures, migrant and diaspora studies, and ecopoetry. She is the editor of the first anthology of Philippine ecopoetry, Sustaining the Archipelago, which was published with the University of Santo Tomas Publishing House in 2018, and co-editor of Empire and Environment: Ecological Ruin in the Transpacific (University of Michigan Press, October 2022). Rina is also the co-diversity officer for the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE), poetry editor of Tiger Moth Review in Singapore, and co-editor of The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada. Aside from this, Rina is originally from Manila, Philippines and is passionate about working with migrant/immigrant communities in BC. 

Rina's recent work Empire and Environment: Ecological Ruin in the Transpacific will be released by the University of Michigan Press in October of 2022. Rina has co-edited the collection with her colleagues Jeffrey Santa Ana (Stonybrook University), Heidi Amin-Hong (University of California, Santa Barbara), and Zhou Xiaojing (University of the Pacific). The collection has been selected for open access funding by Knowledge Unlatched  in Berlin. 

Rina is also co-editing an anthology of Southeast Asian eco-writing with Esther Vincent Xueming (Tiger Moth Review) and Ann Ang (National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University) with a tentative publication date of Fall 2023. The anthology will be published with the University of Hawai’i Press, under the supervision of Craig Santos Perez. 

During her time as a Shadbolt Fellow, Rina wants to host ecological poetry writing workshops with Asian communities. She plans to collaborate with Filipinx poet Karla Lenina Comanda to host a workshop for aspiring Filipinx writers, as well as plan more ecopoetry writing workshops with and for Asian Canadians writers that are attentive to Indigenous, migrant, settler, and arrivant identities.  

Rina's term as a Shadbolt Fellow runs from September 2022 to August 2023. 

Host department: Department of English

A mother to five children ranging from 10-30 years old, Wanda John-Kehewin is a Cree poet and soon-to-be author of two new publications coming out next year. She is also a scriptwriter, with her first feature film being filmed in the summer of 2023.

Her belief is that when we share and stand in our truths, we allow space for people on their healing journey to also stand in theirs; it helps others to realize they are not alone. When we feel that we are not alone, it is easier to follow in other's footsteps in a good, kind way.

Some of her most recent work is a graphic novel called Visions of Crow, which is a three-part series published by Portage Main Press. She also has a young adult (YA) novel coming out in late summer of 2023 called Hopeless in Hope, which is about children in care and how the whole family, including the grandmother, come together to bring the children home again. It is a journey of self-awareness, identity, and growth.

During her residency, Wanda hopes to network and create new connections with the SFU community and the Department of Indigenous Studies. She would also like to host a public reading event for Indigenous Elders to share their work. Furthermore, she plans to work on mixed media; bringing texture and art to poetry using physical items like a drum or porcupine quills and crossing the boundaries of art, and using words to create something new. She is currently working on the Cascading Prescription Project.

Wanda's term as a Shadbolt Fellow runs from September 2022 to April 2023. 

Host department: Department of Indigenous Studies