Raquel Salas Rivera

Raquel Salas Rivera (Mayagüez, 1985) is a Puerto Rican poet, translator, editor, & literary critic. In 2010, he won First and Second Place for Poetry in the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico’s Sixteenth Literary Contest, as well as First Place in the University of Puerto Rico’s Queer Literature Contest. From 2016-2018, he coedited the literary journal The Wanderer. In 2017, he coedited a series of bilingual broadsides of contemporary Puerto Rican poets, which were later collected in the Puerto Rico en mi corazón anthology (Anomalous Press, 2019). In 2018, he was named the Poet Laureate of Philadelphia for a two-year term. The following year he became the inaugural recipient of the Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets & won the New Voices Award from Puerto Rico’s Festival de la Palabra. He has also received fellowships & residencies from the Sundance Institute, the Kimmel Center for Performing Arts, the Arizona Poetry Center, the MacDowell Colony, & CantoMundo.

He is the author of seven chapbooks & five full-length poetry books. His first two books, Caneca de anhelos turbios (Editora Educación Emergente, 2011) & tierra intermitente/intermittent land (Ediciones Alayubia, 2017), were published in Puerto Rico. His third book, lo terciario/the tertiary (2nd ed., Noemi Press, 2019), was on the 2018 National Book Award Longlist & won the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry. His fourth book, while they sleep (under the bed is another country), was published by Birds, LLC in 2019 & was on the 2020 Pen America Open Book Award Longlist. His fifth book, x/ex/exis: poemas para la nación/ poems for the nation was the first recipient of the Ambroggio Prize (Editorial Bilingüe/ Bilingual Press, 2020).

Alongside Claire Jiménez & Ricardo Maldonado, & with the help of a 2020 University of Houston & Arte Publico Press USLDH Grant-In-Aid, he is currently working on creating a digital archive of Puerto Rican poetry. He received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature & Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania and now lives, writes, and teaches in Puerto Rico.