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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).
Jacks McNamara is a queer, trans, neurodivergent artist, writer, healer, organizer, and educator. Their visual art is informed by their parallel practice as a poet, and is deeply shaped by their experiences of synesthesia, their passion for plants, their astonishment at New Mexico landscapes, and their investigations of pre-Christian spirituality in ancestral European homelands. Mcnamara’s body of work explores themes of resilience, devotion, myth, magic, seasonal transformation, and the sheer wonder of the growing world. McNamara is a Lambda Literary Fellow with a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and attended the Aegean School for the Fine Arts in Greece. McNamara is the co-founder of The Icarus Project, co-author of Navigating the Space Between Brilliance and Madness, teaches The Big Queer Poetry Class, hosts the podcast So Many Wings, and writes regular columns for the Santa Fe Reporter.
By Jacks McNamara What is love? What is holy? Inside ovals of radiance, two girls holding hands, nearly matching—white tank tops and jeans, narrow sliver of sun on their cheeks, their left arms. I want to know if they are lovers, sisters, or friends. Their bodies are frank and factual, their bodies are surely sexualized nearly everywhere they go, they are just at that age of turned-enough-toward-adulthood,turned-enough-toward-curves to no longer be entirely their own.
