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On February 22, 2026, 120 people in Las Vegas, NM, attended the El Palacio Plática at the New Mexico Highlands University Donnelly Library. The plática featured writer Myrriah Gómez and photographer and activist Adelita M.
Poetry is my inheritance. My dad, raised by Scottish immigrants in New York City, was taught by Catholic nuns to memorize poetry. He passed the practice on to me; I remember standing at the edge of the Pecos Wilderness as a child, repeating the lines of “The Fairies,” by William Allingham, until I could recite it by heart.
Lauren Camp: The goal was to go everywhere, county to county across the state, reaching many small, rural communities. I started in Alamogordo, in the south-central part of New Mexico, reading poems and answering questions, then watching with delight as everyone in the vast crowd wrote in response to a prompt I gave.
I write letters to my father, the riverbed, when I need answers that mother can’t give. Father empty stream, father arroyo, who houses the rattlesnake beneath his wind-smoothed stones. Father imminent danger, the flash flood, the whipping monsoon mud froth, father aftermath in ribbons of ruined earth.
If you know anything about Lucy Lippard, you know she’s one of the most significant art writers and curators of our time. You may know her thirty published books and countless essays on artists, art movements, and land.
Indigenous Artists in the Movement to Protect Their Homelands Embedded in the mountainscape are pages from a large-scale printing of the Declaration of Independence. The bottom half of the pages are intentionally singed as they meld into distinctly pueblo black and white line work, accentuated by two cornstalks and a prickly-pear cactus at the center with ripe red fruit, seemingly ready for picking.
Read the profile of New Mexico State Poet Laureate Manuel González, here. Albuquerque, this is healing, reclamation. We sanctify the soil, We are more than crime statistics. We are San Jose sunrises, Barelas barrio alchemy, Central Avenue gospel painting hope in bold strokes of dawn.
Read the poem, Ritual. Vessel. Volcano. Vision. The coffee shop was unusually packed with regulars for 7 p.m. on a Wednesday. There was a mix of folks, some looking like they’d been there for a while, entire book bags of belongings sprawled across tables.
LeaflessSunlight strikes the leafless aspen branches,strikes the white picket fence, and as Ilook at highlighted edges, my eyes sting.Tufted grass stalks sway in the flooding rays,and, in the poinsettia of this hour, I needsome darkness to bloom: in this spacea snow leopard leaps among rocks,the rosettes of its fur a moving landscape;its hunger scents the air.
Read six selected Sze poems published in this issue here. At age twenty-one, Arthur Sze hitchhiked from El Paso to Santa Fe in a single day. Knowing no one, and accompanied only by his boundless curiosity, he arrived seeking a place to build a life as a poet.
