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).

Melanie LaBorwit

Melanie LaBorwit is a former educator at the New Mexico History Museum with specialties in museum education, cultural programming, historic and cultural research, and exhibition research and planning. She held prevous positions in the education and enrichments space with the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History, the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center, and the Anderson Abruzzo Museum.

Two men stand next to a large, spherical device covered with wires inside a partially constructed building with exposed beams. [gen-ai]

Lives and Half-lives

BY MELANIE LABORWIT The Santa Fe Opera’s sense of place is extraordinary; operagoers watch world-class productions ensconced in the great outdoors, surrounded by Santa Fe’s gorgeous sunsets, stunning vistas, and starry skies. With this summer’s production of Doctor Atomic, the sense of place factor expands dramatically to include not just the scenic, but the historic and the geographic. John Adams’ opera focuses on the scientists who developed the atomic bomb at Los Alamos—just thirty miles from the Santa Fe Opera—during World War II’s Manhattan Project.