Roque Salas Rivera

Roque Salas Rivera (he/they) is a poet, translator, and editor from Mayagüez, Puerto Rico. In 2018, he was named poet laureate of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Rivera is the author of several collections of poetry, including antes que isla es volcán/ before island is volcano (Beacon Press, 2022); x/ex/exis (University of Arizona Press, 2021), which won 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, and Noemi Press, 2019), which was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award and won a 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry.

Rivera is the coeditor of La piel del arrecife: Antología de poesía trans puertorriqueña (approximately translated “The Skin of the Reef: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Trans Poetry”) (La Impresora & Atarraya Cartonera, 2023), and Puerto Rico en mi corazón (Anomalous Press, 2019), a collection of contemporary Puerto Rican poets. From 2016 to 2018, he was a coeditor and translator for the literary journal The Wanderer. 

Rivera’s translations include Deudas coloniales: El caso de Puerto Rico by Rocío Zambrana (Editora Educación Emergente, 2023) and The Rust of History (Circumference Press, 2022), a selection of the poetic work of their grandfather, Sotero Rivera Avilés. Their translation of Ada Limón’s poem dedicated to NASA’s Europa Clipper mission will be traveling to Jupiter’s moon in 2024.

In 2022, the exhibition no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the first scholarly exhibition focused on Puerto Rican art to be organized by a large US museum in nearly half a century, borrowed one of his verses for its title. 

Rivera earned a PhD in comparative literature and literary theory from the University of Pennsylvania, and he lives, teaches, and writes in Puerto Rico. With a three-year grant from the Mellon Foundation, they worked as investigator and head of the translation team for El proyecto de la literatura puertorriqueña/The Puerto Rican Literature Project (PLPR), a free, bilingual, user-friendly and open access digital portal that anyone can use to learn about and teach Puerto Rican poetry.