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).

Rovina Cai

Rovina Cai (opens in a new tab) is a Rovina Cai is a freelance illustrator from Melbourne, Australia. A graduate of the MFA Illustration as Visual Essay program at the School of Visual Arts in New York, Rovina has more than a decade of experience working with a diverse client list across gaming and book publishing. Her work has been recognised with multiple Hugo and World Fantasy Awards.

illustration of an individuals placed within cloudlike drawings of wolves

We are in the Mountains and Skies

The New Mexico Museum of Space History is perched where the steep foothills of the Sacramento Mountains are flattened by gravity and erosion. The building is flared at the base as if a rocket were hidden at its foot, ready to blast into the sky. The museum rises four stories higher than most buildings in Alamogordo. From the windows of the third story, where the Sci Fi & Sci Fact: Two Worlds Collide exhibition is tucked in the corner, you can see a large swath of the Tularosa Basin—the infamous White Sands and the San Andres Mountains filling the horizon.