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).

Jessica Badner

Jessica Badner is a field archaeologist and the coordinator of New Mexico SiteWatch, a network of trained site stewards who monitor the state’s historic and prehistoric resources as part of a program of the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs’ Historic Preservation Division.

Thieves cut out Navajo images from this cliff face south of Bloomfield, New Mexico. Photograph courtesy Kenneth Russell.

Eyes on the Land

By Paul Weideman Messing with the matrix. That’s one of the problems with the modern-day fad of stacking stones into cairns in wilderness areas. Cairns are an age-old method of marking trails, but those that are constructed for less serious reasons at archaeological sites can cause irreparable damage. “If there were associated grid gardens or shallow subsurface deposits, the rock removal would likely disturb them, compromising the shallow subsurface stratigraphy,” says Jessica Badner.