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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 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 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 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).
Dr. Spencer G. Lucas is a curator of paleontology at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science. He received a BA from the University of New Mexico and his MS and PhD from Yale University. As a paleontologist and stratigrapher, he specializes in the study of late Paleozoic, Mesozoic and early Cenozoic vertebrate fossils and continental deposits, particularly in the American Southwest. Lucas has extensive field experience in the western United States as well as in northern Mexico, Costa Rica, Kazakhstan, Nicaragua, Soviet Georgia and the People’s Republic of China. He has published more than 1000 scientific articles, co-edited fourteen books and authored three books.
![Promotional graphic for Time Travel: From Giant Millipedes to Modern Landscapes with Matt Celeskey and Spencer Lucas, presented by the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/DCA-ECpodcast_S08E04-WIDESCREEN-400x225.jpg)
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Talking about ancient life and the Paleozoic Era (252 to 541 million years ago) in New Mexico elicits various unexpected responses. Oh, cool! The ancient Puebloans. Well, no. A little further back. Great! Dinosaurs. Charismatic megafauna get all the press, but no, earlier in geologic time. Occasionally, Oh. I tried that diet. No, again. Long before people living the Paleo diet, those who walked through White Sands at the end of the last ice age, and before New Mexico’s famous dinosaurs, the Bisti Beast and Coelophysis (74 and 208 million years ago, respectively), what we now call New Mexico was a dynamic landscape teeming with life.
![A fossilized dinosaur skull and neck embedded in reddish-brown rock. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/featuredC-400x225.jpg)
BY SPENCER G. LUCAS AND RICK HENDRICKS New Mexico has long been world-famous as a place where people have made many important dinosaur discoveries. Fossils from our state have helped paleontologists learn much about dinosaurs, including how they evolved, how they lived, and how they became extinct. (more…)
![A person in outdoor clothing excavates fossils embedded in rocky terrain near a hillside. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Forever-Young_3-400x225.jpg)
A groundbreaking juvenile dinosaur discovery in northwestern New Mexico enlivens the record. BY DR. SPENCER G. LUCAS [wonderplugin_slider id="63"] (more…)
