MODERN LANGUAGES PROFESSOR JURIES PANAMANIAN LITERATURE CONTEST

Teresa San Pedro, associate professor of Spanish, served on the 2005 panel of judges for the Ricardo Miró National Literature Award in Panama. San Pedro, originally from Spain, was chosen as a judge for the essay category of the prestigious prize. Her expertise is in the area of 20th Century Central American Literature.

Ricardo Miró (1883-1940) was a Panamanian statesman and writer whose work inspired the inception of an award that sought to recognize and promote Panamanian and Central American literature. Entries are submitted anonymously each year into five categories: novel, short story, poetry, theater, and essay. The winner of each category is then awarded $15,000, which makes the Miró award the largest in Central America. Each category has a panel of three judges—two international and one Panamanian—chosen for their scholarship and merit. 

San Pedro’s invitation to the panel came last year from the government of Panama, and in October 2005, she attended the 63rd Miró prize ceremony that honored essayist Damaris Serrano. Each judge is also required to present their scholarship, in which San Pedro presented the paper, “The Responsibility of an Essay Writer: The Case of Ortega y Gasset.”

The Panamanian government selected San Pedro because of her numerous accolades, in addition to her Central American Literature scholarship. In 1998, she presented a paper titled “The Poetry of the Grotesque and Consuelo Tomás” in Panama, the findings of which were later carried by La Prensa, the largest newspaper in Panama. Other articles about her presentations have appeared in Honduras, Nicaragua, and Spain.  She is also the president of the Association of Spanish Professionals in the United States (ALDEEU). Some of its members include Severo Ochoa (Nobel Prize in Medicine), Ramón J. Sender (writer), Ciriaco Morón Arroyo (professor and critic at Cornell University) and Odón Betanzos (president of the Real Academia de la Lengua in the United States). Several universities in Spain have also published her papers.

In addition, San Pedro is a respected critic on Central American Literature. She has discovered many new writers in that region and has introduced their works to the international literary world. She has presented papers on the works of Central American authors in Spain, Slovakia, Japan, Hawaii, Mexico, Russia, Belize, Poland, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Chile, Puerto Rico, Panama, Peru, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Germany, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Argentina, and the United States.