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).

Shayla Blatchford

Shayla Blatchford (opens in a new tab) is a photographer and interdisciplinary artist whose work examines the ongoing impacts of uranium mining across Indigenous lands in the Southwest. She is the founder of the Anti-Uranium Mapping Project, an interactive platform that uses audio/visual storytelling, research, and counter-mapping to amplify community voices and advocate for environmental justice.

Remembering as Resistance

My mother was adopted through the Indian Adoption Project, a federal program that ran from 1958 to 1967 and was designed to assimilate Native children by placing them with white families. Unexpectedly, she was adopted by my Navajo and Choctaw grandparents. Both had their separate experiences of assimilation as children through the Indian Boarding School policy. In 1964, their work with the Bureau of Indian Affairs moved our family from the Navajo Nation to Los Angeles under the Indian Relocation Act.