Raquel Salas Rivera

Their work while they sleep (under the bed is another country) was longlisted for the 2020 Pen America Open Book Award.

In 2019, they won the Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets.

They are a 2019-2021 Writer for the Art for Justice Fund at the University of Arizona Poetry Center.

During their tenure as Poet Laureate of Philadelphia, Salas Rivera created a multilingual poetry festival called "We (Too) Are Philly" inspired by the work "I, Too" by the African-American poet Langston Hughes. The summer 2018 festival, co-organized with poets Ashley Davis, Kirwyn Sutherland, and Raena Shirali, featured Philadelphia-based poets of color. The goal of the organizers was to diversify the poetry scene to encourage the mixing or desegregation of audiences, while selecting locations of significance to particular Philadelphia neighborhoods that usually do not host poetry readings.

They were a resident artist of the 2018-2019 Kimmel Center Jazz Residency, a 2019 Playwright Fellow at the Sundance Institute Theater Program, a 2020 writer in residence for the Norwegian Festival of Literature, and a 2020 resident artist of the MacDowell Colony.

Salas Rivera was a 2018 fellow of the CantoMundo Poetry Workshop to develop Latinx poets and poetry.

Salas Rivera was chosen as the fourth poet laureate of Philadelphia in 2018, under the auspices of the Free Library of Philadelphia. According to the selection committee, the poet was chosen because of their desire to use poetry to engage the subject of diversity in Philadelphia and its Puerto Rican community.

They received the 2018 Ambroggio Prize from the Academy of American Poets, honoring poets whose first language is Spanish, for their manuscript x/ex/exis (poemas para la nación).

Their work lo terciario/the tertiary was longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry in 2018 and won the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry.

Salas Rivera lives in San Juan, Puerto Rico. In 2017, Salas Rivera and Allison Harris raised thousands of dollars to assist lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Puerto Ricans who were impacted by Hurricane Maria that year. Through their efforts, they were able to bring 5 queer/transgender persons to the United States and support them, with assistance from the Mazzoni Center. That same year, Salas Rivera, alongside Ricardo Alberto Maldonado, Erica Mena, and Carina del Valle Schorske, published Puerto Rico en mi corazón, a series of bilingual broadside of contemporary Puerto Rican poets. All profits from the sale of the broadsides were donated to the grassroots organization Taller Salud, in order to aid with recovery after the devastation caused by the impact of hurricanes Irma and María.

Their work lo terciario/the tertiary focuses on the Puerto Rican debt crisis and the economic and social impact of the 2016 United States congressional measure called the PROMESA Law that transferred control of the island's finances and outstanding debt to an external control board. Salas Rivera titled each book section after Marxist economic ideas from Das Kapital: “The Debt-Production Process,” “The Debt-Circulation Process,” and “Notes on a Derailed Circulation", beginning each poem with a quote by Karl Marx, as both a critique and a subversion of Marxist language.

The poet attended the Universidad de Puerto Rico at Mayagüez for their undergraduate degree, and had an instrumental role in organizing student protests at that campus in 2010.

Raquel Salas Rivera (born December 26, 1985) is a bilingual Puerto Rican poet who writes in Spanish and English, focusing on the experience of being a migrant to the United States, the colonial status of Puerto Rico, and of identifying as a queer Puerto Rican and Philadelphian of non-binary gender. They have a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania and were selected as the fourth Poet Laureate of Philadelphia in 2018. They currently live in Puerto Rico.