Roque Raquel Salas Rivera (Mayagüez, 1985) is a Puerto Rican poet, educator, and translator of trans experience. The 2018-19 Poet Laureate of Philadelphia, he has received the Premio Nuevas Voces and the inaugural Ambroggio Prize, among other awards and recognitions. His eight poetry books include lo terciario/ the tertiary (Noemi, 2019), longlisted for the National Book Award and winner of the Lambda Literary Award, and while they sleep (under the bed is another country) (Birds LLC, 2019), which inspired the title of the exhibition no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria. His poetry has been musicalized by Angélica Negrón, Jonathan Woody, Anaïs Mejías.

From 2016 to 2018, he was a coeditor and translator for the literary journal The Wanderer. He has edited the anthologies Puerto Rico en mi corazón (Anomalous, 2019) and La piel del arrecife: Antología de poesía trans puertorriqueña (La Impresora, 2023). A co-founder of El proyecto de la literatua puertorriqueña/ The Puerto Rican Literature Project, he served as supervisor of the translation team and investigator from April 2021 until September 2023. He is currently the Creative Editor for sx salon: a small axe literary platform.

He has translated collections by Irizelma Robles, Xavier Valcárcel, Myr Olivares, and Kadiri Vaquer Fernández. The Rust of History (Circumference, 2022), his translation of poetry by Sotero Rivera Avilés, was longlisted for ALTA’s National Translation Award, and his translation of Ada Limón’s poem dedicated to NASA’s Europa Clipper mission is currently on its way to Jupiter’s moon. Other translation projects include Hijas de América Latina (Ed. Sandra Guzmán, HarperCollins Español, 2023), Deudas coloniales: el caso de Puerto Rico (Rocío Zambrana, Editora Educación Emergente, 2022), and animal fiero y tierno/ fierce and tender animal (Angelamaría Dávila, CENTRO, 2024). In 2024, he received a grant from TEN:TACLES to co-create “We Had Nothing to Lose”: The Speeches and Writings of Sylvia Rivera, a bilingual project whose ultimate outcome will be the publication of the activist’s transcribed and translated work.

His most recent book, Algarabía (Graywolf, 2025) is an epic poem that follows the journey of Cenex, a trans being who retrospectively narrates his life while navigating the stories told on his behalf. Salas Rivera is an assistant professor in the Comparative Literature Program at the Mayagüez Campus of the University of Puerto Rico. His cat, Pietri, is the ungrateful muse who inspires a great many of his poems.