Citation for Margarita Rigal Aragón (Honorary Membership)

As president of the Poe Studies Association (PSA), it is my honor and pleasure to present this award to Dr. Margarita Rigal Aragón on the occasion of this Third International Congress of the Edgar Allan Poe Spanish Association (EAPSA), of which she serves as president and whose members individually, and in collaboration with those of the PSA, work to advance the study and appreciation of Poe. Honorary membership is the highest honor bestowed by the PSA on individual members for significant and sustained contributions to the field of Poe studies and service to our organization. Because of her important contributions to scholarship on Poe (in Spanish and English), her numerous translations, her tireless efforts to teach new generations of Poe scholars in Spain, and her dedication to interdisciplinary approaches to Poe, she is richly deserving of this award.Dr. Rigal Aragón is professor of English at Facultad de Humanidades de Albacete, Universidad de Castilla-la Mancha, where she teaches undergraduate courses in American literature and postgraduate courses in the short story genre. Her Poe-related publications include an edited collection, Los legados de Poe (2011), a coedited collection, A Descent into Edgar Allan Poe and His Works: The Bicentennial (2010), and a coauthored study (with Fernando González-Moreno), The Portrayal of the Grotesque in Stoddard's and Quantin's Illustrated Editions of Edgar Allan Poe (1884): An Interdisciplinary Analysis of the Relations between the Visual and the Verbal (2017). She has also authored book chapters in such collections as Translated Poe (2014) and Poe Spaces (forthcoming) and published numerous articles, translations, and coauthored studies. Her collaborative and interdisciplinary research is especially noteworthy because such work is at the heart of the Literature and Art Research Group (LyA), which she co-directs.Dr. Rigal Aragón's love of Poe dates to her teenage years, when she was a voracious reader of "almost anything" presented to her. She read her older sister's books and eventually Poe's tales in Historias extraordniarias, thanks to her mother, a schoolteacher, who paid monthly for a subscription to the Biblioteca Básica Salvat. Her academic year abroad in the United States, including the influence of her American family, the Francks, and her beloved teacher, Ms. Roberts, caused her to "fall in love with the USA and with American literature." Encouragement from professors and from her own reading, as well as an early awareness that there was a need for a "rigorous, objective, and original criticism of Poe in Spanish," led her to write her doctoral dissertation on Poe. Her aim "to rediscover Poe" for Spanish readers began in graduate school and has continued throughout her career. Her first presentation on Poe in the United States, at a PSA-sponsored session at the 2004 MLA, led to her involvement with the PSA, a 2009 bicentennial conference on Poe (while we were celebrating Poe's birth in Boston), her establishment of the Edgar Allan Poe Spanish Association (EAPSA) and the LyA, and now, three international congresses on Poe (in 2018, 2020, and 2023) in Spain. Above all, her greatest legacy is her students, who share her love of Poe, American literature, and beauty in its various forms of artistic expression.Concerning Dr. Rigal Aragón's contributions to Poe studies, PSA vice president Emron Esplin writes, "The membership list of the EAPSA (an organization she founded and one of the three most active Poe societies in the world) demonstrates her influence on Poe studies in Spain, as it is full of colleagues that she has invited to participate in the organization, former students who now hold academic posts across the country, and current students whom she is advising." Longtime colleague, collaborator, and co-director of the LyA Research Group, Fernando Gonzales Moreno credits her for introducing him to Poe and encouraging him "to start researching all the immense visual legacy he has generated." He also writes that for over twenty years the LyA, which is their joint creation, "has not only given them immense professional joys (courses, conferences, publications, projects, etc.), but also personal, more gratifying joys, such as seeing how their students . . . have been building their own academic and professional careers." All of us who know and work with her would agree that for all Dr. Rigal Aragón has achieved professionally, she remains kind, humble, and dedicated to helping Spanish readers, and readers the world over, achieve a fuller, more authentic understanding of Poe.For her many scholarly achievements, and more especially her cultivation and promotion of Poe studies in Spain, the PSA Executive Committee and the PSA membership recognize Dr. Margarita Rigal Aragón as a 2023 Honorary Poe Studies Association Life Member.