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).

Chelsey Johnson

Chelsey Johnson is the author of the novel Stray City and the director of the City of Santa Fe’s Arts & Culture Department.

An older person sits in an orange armchair using a laptop in a bright, yellow-walled room with bookshelves, a couch, and stacked books.

The Counterculture’s Curator: Lucy Lippard on Writing, Art and Life 

If you know anything about Lucy Lippard, you know she’s one of the most significant art writers and curators of our time. You may know her thirty published books and countless essays on artists, art movements, and land. You may know her as a cofounder of the legendary artists’ book space, Printed Matter, the feminist art collectives Heresies and the Ad Hoc Women’s Committee, or any number of groups that rose up in the latter half of the twentieth century to fight institutional gatekeepers for fair inclusion of women and people of color.

A grayscale aerial view of a barren landscape with scattered craters of various sizes, distant mountains, and cloudy sky overhead.

The Shapes of Space

Space is a shapeshifting throughline in Daisy Atterbury’s book The Kármán Line. There’s space as in I need some—a lover pulling away. There’s space misread as emptiness, as in the vast expanses of deserts and oceans, open space where governments detonate practice bombs. The space of the page flows and breaks around prose, poetry, and numbers. Above all else (literally) lies outer space, all stars, infinity, and awe, transcending the line between humanity’s illusory borders and the infinite free space beyond.