Roque Raquel Salas Rivera is a Puerto Rican poet, educator, and translator. The 2018-19 Poet Laureate of Philadelphia, his awards and recognitions include the Premio Nuevas Voces, the Letras Boricuas Fellowship, the Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book Award, and the inaugural Ambroggio Prize. His poetics are rooted in the fractal tenderness of the gongolí, the quenepa vendors’ fight against the midday sun, memory’s labyrinthine routes, his grandmother who gathered watercress near Añasco’s river, his own diasporic unease, decolonial translation’s great unfulfilled promise, and, of course, his Caribbean country populated by ghosts and longings.

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, and Anaïs Mejías. In 2026, he won a second Lammy for his epic poem Algarabía (Graywolf, 2025).

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.

His translations include books by Irizelma Robles, Xavier Valcárcel de Jesús, Myr Olivares, Kadiri Vaquer Fernández, and Quiara Alegría Hudes. The Rust of History (Circumference, 2022), his translation of poetry by Sotero Rivera Avilés, was longlisted for ALTA’s National Translation Award and the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. He had the pleasure of translating Ada Limón’s poem dedicated to NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, which is currently on its way to Jupiter’s moon. Other 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, Interviews, and Writings of Sylvia Rivera, a bilingual project whose ultimate outcome will be the publication of the activist’s transcribed and translated work.

At the end of 2019, Roque returned to his homeland. He is currently an assistant professor in the Comparative Literature Program at the Mayagüez Campus of the University of Puerto Rico.