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For over a century, El Palacio has been a forum for voices exploring New Mexico’s art, archaeology, history, and landscape. Explore the writers, photographers, historians, and scientists whose perspectives have defined the magazine’s pages—past and present.
Arthur Sze is the current U.S. Poet Laureate. Sze is a poet, translator, and editor. He is the author of twelve books, including Into the Hush, Sight Lines, and others. Sze’s poems have been translated into fifteen languages, and he is the recipient of the National Book Award among many other honors. He lives in Santa Fe.
Deborah Jackson Taffa is a citizen of the Quechan Nation and Laguna Pueblo. Her memoir Whiskey Tender was a 2024 National Book Award Finalist and was longlisted for the 2025 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. Taffa serves as the director of the MFA in creative writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts.
Cara Romero is an award-winning contemporary fine art photographer. An enrolled citizen of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe, Romero’s expansive oeuvre has been informed by formal training in film, digital, fine art, and commercial photography. She maintains a studio in Santa Fe, regularly participates in Native American art fairs, and was featured in PBS’ Craft in America (2019).
Daisy Atterbury (opens in a new tab) has written for publications including The Paris Review Daily, BOMB, and The New Yorker online. Currently teaching in American Studies and the Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at University of New Mexico, Atterbury’s work investigates queer life and fantasies of space and place, with an interest in unraveling colonial narratives in the Southwest. This excerpt is from The Kármán Line, published by Rescue Press in 2024. The Kármán Line was a St. Lawrence Book Award Finalist and is described as “a new cosmology” (Lucy Lippard) and “a cerebral altar to the desert” (Raquel Gutiérrez).
I’m going to Spaceport America. To access the spaceport, I’ll have to cross the Jornada del Muerto, a desert basin cut by a hundred-mile road. I calculate and the Jornada del Muerto is longer than the distance between the edge of space and my body on land. Trace one expanse, maybe you’d carve across another. The Jornada has been mapped many times, including by Google.
