lo terciario / the tertiary (2nd Edition)

National Book Award Finalist

Roque Salas Rivera (he/they) is a poet, translator, and editor from Mayagüez, Puerto Rico. In 2018, he was named poet laureate of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Rivera is the author of several collections of poetry, including antes que isla es volcán/ before island is volcano (Beacon Press, 2022); x/ex/exis(University of Arizona Press, 2021), which won the 2018 Ambroggio Prize; while they sleep (under the bed is another country) (Birds, LLC, 2019), which was long-listed for the 2020 PEN America Open Book Award and was a finalist for CLMP's 2020 Firecracker Award; and lo terciario/ the tertiary(Timeless, Infinite Light, 2018, and Noemi Press, 2019), which was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award and won a 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry.

Rivera is the coeditor of La piel del arrecife: Antología de poesía trans puertorriqueña (approximately translated "The Skin of the Reef: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Trans Poetry") (La Impresora & Atarraya Cartonera, 2023), and Puerto Rico en mi corazón (Anomalous Press, 2019), a collection of contemporary Puerto Rican poets. From 2016 to 2018, he was a coeditor and translator for the literary journal The Wanderer.

Rivera's translations include Deudas coloniales: El caso de Puerto Rico by Rocío Zambrana (Editora Educación Emergente, 2023) and The Rust of History (Circumference Press, 2022), a selection of the poetic work of their grandfather, Sotero Rivera Avilés. Their translation of Ada Limón's poem dedicated to NASA's Europa Clipper mission will be traveling to Jupiter's moon in 2024.

Rivera earned a PhD in comparative literature and literary theory from the University of Pennsylvania, and he lives, teaches, and writes in Puerto Rico. With a three-year grant from the Mellon Foundation, they worked as investigator and head of the translation team for El proyecto de la literatura puertorriqueña/The Puerto Rican Literature Project (PLPR), a free, bilingual, user-friendly and open access digital portal that anyone can use to learn about and teach Puerto Rican poetry.

Urayoán Noel is a Puerto Rican poet, critic, translator, and performer who teaches at New York University and at Stetson University's MFA of the Americas. He is the author of the critical study In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam (University of Iowa Press, 2014), winner of the LASA Latino Studies Book Award, and of eight books of poetry, including Boringkén(Ediciones Callejón, 2008), named a Book of the Year by El Nuevo Día, and Transversal (University of Arizona Press, 2021), named a Book of the Year by the New York Public Library Book and also longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award. Noel's translations include No Budu Please by Wingston González (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018) and adjacent islands by Nicole Cecilia Delgado (UDP/DoubleCross Press/La Impresora, 2022). He has been a finalist for the National Translation Award, the Best Translated Book Award, the International Latino Book Awards, the National Poetry Series Paz Prize for Poetry, and the Modern Language Association book prizes, and he has been honored with a National Books Critics Circle Small Press Highlights selection as well as fellowships from the Howard Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Schomburg Center and a Letras Boricuas fellowship in poetry from the Mellon and Flamboyán Foundations. Noel's work has been exhibited at the Museum of the City of New York and the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico and has been published in The New York Times, Poetry, and Google Arts & Culture. His international performances include Poesiefestival Berlin, Barcelona Poesia, and the Toronto Biennial of Art, and he has been both fellow and faculty at CantoMundo and the Macondo Writers Workshop. Originally from Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, Urayoán Noel lives in the Bronx and is an editorial advisor for the Latino Poetry initiative (Library of America). He serves on the board of the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center, and is a founding member of The Latinx Project at NYU, as well as Editor-in-Chief of its online publication Intervenxions,