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).

Molly Boyle

Molly Boyle is the managing editor of New Mexico Magazine. She is an experienced arts and culture writer, having written articles for El Palacio magazine, New Mexico Magazine, the Santa Fe Reporter, the Albuquerque Journal, and other outlets.

A building with a conical roof stands near an arena at sunset, surrounded by trees and open fields under a partly cloudy sky. [gen-ai]

Challenging History

By Charlotte Jusinski The town of Fort Sumner, New Mexico, is quiet and pastoral. The streets of the farming and ranching community are gravelly and pocked, and rusty signs for Billy the Kid’s grave or Fort Sumner Lake dot the shoulders like tired but richly patinaed sentinels. Sometimes the whole town smells vaguely of petrichor, thanks to the Pecos River lurching lazily through the plains nearby, and irrigation ditches lining the streets fill the fields thick with green crops each spring and summer.

A man wearing glasses and a vest stands on railway tracks with hands pressed together in a prayer gesture. [gen-ai]

It’s In the Telling

By Molly Boyle On January 20, 2021, when 22-year-old Amanda Gorman read her poem “The Hill We Climb” at the presidential inauguration of Joe Biden, the pandemic-stricken world sat up and took notice. Gorman’s poetry, which combined nimble wordplay with the hopeful verve of youth at the dawn of a new era, was elevated by her electric delivery of 723 words.

Base Camp for Trinity Site was located on the Dave and Ross McDonald Ranch and was ten miles southwest of Ground Zero. Photo courtesy of WSMR.

Whatever Decided Them

By Molly Boyle THEY CAME TO THE LUSH, vast land east of Las Cruces from places like Texas, Oklahoma, Socorro, and Magdalena in the waning years of the nineteenth century. To them, the Tularosa Basin looked like prime ranching country, sided by the Sacramento Mountains in the east and the San Andres and Oscura ranges to the west. In the wet years of the 1880s, when people trickled into the basin with herds of cattle and sheep, native grasses grew to the height of a horse’s shoulder.

A judge with clasped hands announces the opening of court and calls two governors to be seated. [gen-ai]

History with a Grain of Salt

By Molly Boyle According to an old saw, history is written by the victors. But depending on who gets to create the official record, it can also be composed by the losers—or by those who weren’t even there. When graphic novel artist Turner Avery Mark-Jacobs was invited by the New Mexico History Museum to do his own rendering of the battle depicted in the museum’s Segesser II hide painting, he sifted through multiple narratives of the ill-fated 1720 Spanish military expedition of Pedro de Villasur.