Roque Raquel Salas Rivera

Roque Raquel Salas Rivera was born in Puerto Rico and grew up there and in the United States. He received a BA from the Universidad de Puerto Rico and a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. 

Salas Rivera is the author of numerous collections of poetry: Algarabía: The Song of Cenex, Natural Son of the Isle Alarabíyya (Graywolf, 2025); antes que isla es volcán/ before island is volcano (Beacon Press, 2022); x/ex/exis: poemas para la nación (poems for the nation) (University of Arizona Press, 2021), which was selected by Alberto Ríos for the 2018 Ambroggio Prize; while they sleep (under the bed is another country) (Birds, LLC, 2019), which was long-listed for the 2020 PEN America Open Book Award and was a finalist for CLMP’s 2020 Firecracker Award; and lo terciario/the tertiary (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2018), which received the 2019 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry and was long-listed for the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry.

Salas Rivera also authored tierra intermitente (Ediciones Alayubia, 2017) and Caneca de anhelos turbios (Editora Educación Emergente, 2011), both of which were published in Puerto Rico. Salas Rivera is coeditor of Puerto Rico en mi corazón (Anomalous Press, 2019), a collection of contemporary Puerto Rican poets. He is the translator of the poetry collection The Rust of History (Circumference Books, 2022) by Sotero Rivera Avíles. Avíles was Rivera’s grandfather. 

In 2019, Salas Rivera was named an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow and served as the 2018–19 poet laureate of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He writes and teaches in Puerto Rico and, in 2023, served as the Felice Massie Distinguished Visiting Professor in the department of Romance languages and literatures at Washington University in St. Louis.