Roque Raquel Salas Rivera is a Puerto Rican poet, educator, and translator of trans experience. His honors include being named Poet Laureate of Philadelphia, the Premio Nuevas Voces, and the inaugural Ambroggio Prize. Among his six poetry books are 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 for no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

From 2016 to 2018, he was a coeditor and translator for the literary journal The Wanderer. During that period, he was also a member of the anti-fascist Yerbamala Collective. 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, when he retired from the project.

His curatorial work includes the “We (Too) Are Philly” poetry festival, co-hosted with Ashley Davis, Kirwyn Sutherland, and Raena Shirali (2018); “Home on Our Back,” a dual reading hosted alongside Boston Poet Laureate Porsha Olayiwola (2019); "este borde no es una frontera", a series of marathon readings organized with Irizelma Robles and Cristina Pérez Díaz (2021); and the anthological reading "el bello no ser de nuestros cuerpos" (2022).

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).

His seventh book, la bella crisis, will have two editions, one published in Ecuador (Recodo) and one on the archipelago (Semipermeable). Algarabía, his trans epic, will be published in 2025 by Graywolf Press. Roque lives and creates in a suburb of Río Piedras and is an Assistant Professor at the UPRRP. He believes in a free Puerto Rico and a better world.