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).

Jack Loeffler

Jack Loeffler has produced more than four hundred documentary radio programs based on his original recordings, authored or co-authored eight books, written dozens of essays for diverse publications, and has produced numerous sound collages for major museums including the Museum of International Folk Art and the New Mexico History Museum. In 2017 and early 2018, he co-curated, with Meredith Davidson, the Voices of Counterculture in the Southwest exhibition at the New Mexico History Museum.

A bearded man smiling, wearing a bandana and binoculars around his neck; text reads Headed into the Wind: A Memoir by Jack Loeffler. [gen-ai]

From Headed into the Wind: A Memoir

BY JACK LOEFFLER The North American Southwest is desert country, a vast mosaic of dry habitats where elevation, longitude, geography, and weather patterns interact to determine the nature of prevailing life-forms. Most life-forms are indigenous, but a few others roll in like tumbleweeds, like I did one night during the summer of 1957 by human reckoning. I camped in my car by the side of the road and woke up to blazing sun in the Mojave Desert, alien country to a native West Virginian.

Two people ride an inflatable raft on a river; one wears a striped shirt and headband, the other a red bandana and sunglasses. A hat rests on the raft’s edge. Rocky terrain is visible in the background. [gen-ai]

The Practice of Aural History

Imagine yourself camped in the Kuakatch Wash in an isolated area of the Sonoran Desert. It is just after dawn. You’ve made your first cup of coffee thanks to the old Coleman stove in your truck. You are sitting in your camp chair. Your sound recorder is turned on, lying in your lap, attached to a pair of microphones by cables.