John Iremil Teodoro

John Iremil Teodoro is poet, prose writer, playwright, translator, and literary scholar who has authored more than twenty books in Kinaray-a, Filipino, Hiligaynon, and English. Teodoro is from San Jose de Buenavista, Antique, in Panay Island, central Philippines. He is a queer writer whose subjects include LGBTQ+ rights, environmental issues, and the diasporic wanderings of Filipinos. 

Teodoro’s awards include two National Book Awards from the Manila Critics Circle and the National Book Development Board of the Philippines and a SEA WRITE (Southeast Asian Writers) Award in 2019 from the Kingdom of Thailand. 

Teodoro served as the secretary general of Unyon ng mga Manunulat sa Pilipinas (UMPIL, or the Writers’ Union of the Philippines) from 2016 to 2023. In April 2024, he was a visiting scholar at Mahidol University in Thailand. His column “Panay Sirena” is published every Wednesday in the Daily Guardian, a daily newspaper published in Iloilo City. He is a full professor in the department of literature at De La Salle University in Manila where he is also the director of the Bienvenido N. Santos Creative Writing Center.