On October 10, 2025, the Art of Translation working group, led by Emma Lloyd from the Department of Comparative Literature, hosted a lunchtime gathering with Puerto Rican poet, translator, and educator Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, in conversation about speculative Caribbean poetry and the art of translation. The event, co-sponsored by the Townsend Center for the Humanities, was organized by Coral Murphy Marcos and moderated by Claudia Martínez Rivera, both from the Department of Spanish & Portuguese.
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 seven 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 at the Whitney Museum. His work as a translator includes writers such as Irizelma Robles, Xavier Valcárcel, and Ada Limón. In September 2025, Graywolf Press published his epic poem Algarabía. Roque currently teaches in the Comparative Literature Program at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez, is the Creative Editor for sx salon: a small axe literary platform, and serves the needs of a fierce cat named Pietri.
Roque read excerpts, in both Spanish and English, from his new epic poem Algarabía that follows a trans being named Cenex, an inhabitant of a colony of Earth in an alternate universe, on his journey to find identity, kinship, and nation. The conversation covered topics ranging from the roles of speculative poetry in literary and cultural production in Puerto Rico and the broader Caribbean from and towards an anticolonial perspective, as well as the “trans” in translation as theory and praxis for navigating and problematizing the binaries of identity/language, methods of self-translation, y la cuestión del Spanglish.