Contributors

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

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

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

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).

Jason Asenap

Jason Asenap is a Comanche and Muscogee writer and filmmaker based in Albuquerque. He holds an MFA in Screenwriting from IAIA. His films have screened around the U.S. and internationally. In addition to filmmaking, Asenap writes about Indigenous contributions to film, art, and culture. He is an award-winning Indigenous film critic, including awards for his film criticism from the Native American Journalist Association in 2020 and 2022 and an award from the Los Angeles Press Club for best Visual Arts/Architecture Feature in 2024. You can find his writing in Esquire, Variety, Vox, Alta Journal, Grist, High Country News, Salon, and New Mexico Magazine.

Dylan McLaughlin, Skowhegan, 2023. Courtesy of artist.

Dylan McLaughlin: The Alchemy of Art and Science

A drone glides across an empty riverbed, then transitions to a seemingly endless double line of tanker cars transporting oil on train tracks in the video art piece, In Transition Is the Most Honest. Another drone flies downward from atop a mountain overlooking Questa, near Taos Pueblo, in the video, In So We Sing the Land. In this piece, the drone follows erosion lines down a mountain from a point of view no human being could naturally see; aerial footage of the aftermath of mining from the top of the mountain downward.