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).

Patricia L. Crown

Patricia L. Crown is the Leslie Spier Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2014 and has conducted field investigations in the Ancestral Pueblo, Mogollon, and Hohokam areas of the American Southwest and has worked in Chaco Canyon since 2005. With collaborator Jeffrey Hurst, she identified the first prehispanic cacao (chocolate) north of the Mexican border in ceramics from Chaco Canyon using organic residue analysis. She directed the re-excavation of a room in Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon in 2013, and the results of that study were published in 2020 by UNM Press as a volume, The House of the Cylinder Jars: Room 28 at Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon.