Rebecca Salazar
Biography
Rebecca Salazar (she/they) is a queer, disabled, and racialized Latinx writer currently living on the unceded territory of the Wolastoqiyik people. Their first full-length collection sulphurtongue (McClelland & Stewart 2021) was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, the New Brunswick Book Awards, the Atlantic Book Awards, and the League of Canadian Poets’ Pat Lowther Memorial Award. antibody (McClelland & Stewart, 2025) is their second poetry collection. Rebecca writes about queerness, chronic illness, ecology, and body horror.
Micro-interview
My best friend in high school used to borrow her older sister's university textbooks, and we would secretly devour page after page of Shakespeare during classes we didn't like. The little poetry my high school did teach was limited to "pretty" poems by dead white men we felt no connection to--and while Shakespeare was certainly another one, it made a difference that we chose him for the bad puns, big drama, and queerness we needed from poetry.
I wrote a few poems as a kid and really bad imitations of Shakespeare in my teens--at that point, I hadn't yet gotten to see all the things poetry can be, and thought it just meant chopping up feelings into something that rhymed and sounded antique. It was when I started meeting other writers and especially living poets (who knew!) that my idea of poetry expanded so much that I felt it make room for the voice I needed to write. I think I only admitted I had become a poet in my early 20s.
To imagine the world differently--not just to see it in a different way, but to imagine alternate worlds we can make real.
