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).

Dr. Larry S. Crumpler

Dr. Larry S. Crumpler (opens in a new tab) is the Research Curator of Volcanology and Space Sciences at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science and serves as an associate professor at the University of New Mexico. Larry has participated in NASA planetary missions including the Viking, Pathfinder, and Mars Exploration Rover missions, and Magellan synthentic aperture radar mapping missions to Venus. His current research focuses on volcanic terrain in New Mexico and Arizona and the geology of terrestrial planets and planetary volcanism.

Aerial view of an isolated, cone-shaped volcanic hill with a winding road circling its slope, surrounded by flat, sparsely vegetated land. [gen-ai]

The Land of A Thousand Volcanoes

Story and Photographs by Larry Crumpler Every volcano is like a living thing. They are born, live, die, and leave behind their remains, eventually returning to the Earth as fragmented rock and soil. Sometimes they live in the presence of entire communities of other volcanoes that we geologists call volcanic fields, and sometimes as isolated individuals. Volcanic eruptions have happened in the recent as well as the not-so-recent past in New Mexico, and they will happen again.