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).

Maurice M. Dixon, Jr. (BFA, MFA)

Maurice M. Dixon, Jr. (BFA, MFA) (opens in a new tab) is a painter, tinsmith, antiquarian, collector, and researcher. He a consulted on an exhibition about Rick Dillingham at the New Mexico Museum of Art, and is also at work on an account of Dillingham’s life and artistry.

Cowboy Boots and Cow Pies, Clay and a Soup Spoon:

By Maurice M. Dixon, Jr. In the spring of 1974, while firing some newly crafted clay vessels, an incident radically changed James Richard (“Rick”) Dillingham II’s artistic trajectory. Retrieving the fired vessels from his friend and noted Albuquerque ceramicist Billie Walters’s backyard kiln, the tall, lanky, bearded Dillingham was dismayed to discover that one of his prized pieces—a marginally burnished globe whose upper body was ornamented with regularly spaced rows of perforations—had cracked in the firing or while cooling.

Laboratory of Anthropology foyer chandelier. Terneplate, reverse-painted glass. Approx. 60 × 55 inches. Photograph by Nancy Hunter Warren, as printed in El Palacio, vol. 87, no. 3.

A Fortuitous Convergence

By Maurice M. Dixon, Jr. Although rare, every so often a convergence occurs of such magnitude that, at the time, little or no thought is given to its consequence by those involved. Nevertheless the significance of its occurrence has traversed the decades, continuing until the present. Such a convergence transpired nearly one hundred years ago with the most unlikely of participants: an East Coast philanthropist of immense wealth; a Portuguese-speaking, up-and-coming architect; a gifted young artisan from the llano of northeastern New Mexico; and a multi-talented native of Santa Fe, recently deceased and largely unknown beyond the Spanish-speaking population of New Mexico and Southern Colorado.