Raquel Salas Rivera is a Puerto Rican poet, translator, and literary critic. In 2018, they were named the Poet Laureate of Philadelphia for a two-year term. The following year they became the inaugural recipient of the Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets and won the New Voices Award from Puerto Rico’s Festival de la Palabra.
Their third book, lo terciario (the tertiary), was on the 2018 National Book Award Longlist and won the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry. Their fifth book, x/ex/exis: poemas para la nación (poems for the nation) was the first recipient of the Ambroggio Prize.
They are working on the epic poem, Las diez muertes de Sotero Rivera Avilés (The Ten Deaths of Sotero Rivera Avilés), an inventory of the near deaths of their grandfather and Puerto Rican poet from the Generation of the Fifties. It will reimagine his encounters with death through a rewriting of his lives.
