A Reading and Conversation with Roque Raquel Salas Rivera

Roque Raquel Salas Rivera is a Puerto Rican poet, educator, and translator. The 2018-19 Poet Laureate of Philadelphia, he has received the Premio Nuevas Voces, the Letras Boricuas Fellowship, the Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book Award, and the 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 at the Whitney Museum. 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). His translations have won a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship and the Sundial Literary Translation Award, and have been longlisted for ALTA National Translation Award in Poetry and the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. Roque currently teaches in the Comparative Literature Program at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez, and is the Creative Editor for sx salon: a small axe literary platform.