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).

Leslie Linthicum

Leslie Linthicum is a writer and editor who lives in New Mexico.

Black and white portrait of an older man with gray hair and glasses, wearing a dark shirt, looking slightly to the left against a cloudy textured background. [gen-ai]

An Honest Instinct

By Leslie Linthicum “The first thing I should say,” photographer Joel-Peter Witkin told a writer for Vanity Fair decades ago, “is I am not a monster.” His photographic canon—stylized portraits of cross-dressers, amputees, masked nudes, body parts, and corpses —has been called grotesque, perverted, and macabre. But shuffling around his photo studio in Albuquerque’s South Valley in sweatpants and slippers, wearing his signature oversized glasses and a T-shirt printed with one of his most famous images, the 83-year-old comes across as anything but dark.