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).

Herbert Lotz

Herbert Lotz was born and raised on a small farm town in Illinois and drafted in his third year at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he studied photography. He served as a radio operator in Vietnam in 1968 detached to the 25th Infantry Division at Cu Chi, the experience of which was to affect him the rest of his life, not unlike so many others of his generation. Driving into Santa Fe from the north passing by the National Cemetery in 1970, Lotz felt he had found his new home but still struggled to deal with his wartime experiences. In 1981, Lotz finally came to terms with his experience and continues to work with the photographs he took in Vietnam.

Kidney-shaped vessel

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.

Two older men; the first wears a gray shirt and holds a camera outdoors, the second wears a black shirt and holds a small bird sculpture against a gray background. [gen-ai]

Survival of the Artist

MODERATED BY PETER BG SHOEMAKER & CONDENSED BY CANDACE WALSH Peter: The Be Here Now collaborations are using the counterculture movement in the United States as their centerpiece, their lodestone. Herb, your exhibition of photographs focuses on your experiences and your fellow soldiers in Vietnam. Michael, one of the many remarkable things about your art is your perspective as someone who lost his sight while a soldier in Vietnam.