![A smiling man wearing sunglasses and a black shirt holds a red glassblowing piece in a workshop. Text reads: Encounter Culture, Season 1 Episode 4. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/S1E4-blue-blue-400x225.jpg)
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).
Robert “Spooner” Marcus
Robert “Spooner” Marcus is a contemporary glass artist from Ohkay Owingeh known for incorporating Pueblo pottery designs and styles into his unique work. His great-grandmother was Regina Cata who played a leading role in reviving traditional pottery-making in Ohkay Owingeh. His grandmother and mother were also potters, and Marcus found working in glass to be a natural outgrowth of this distinguished pottery background. He merges traditional pottery forms and designs into his one-of-a-kind works of glass and has also created a glass pot inspired by micaceous clay pottery.
Story Tellers in Glass
By Dr. Letitia Chambers Clearly Indigenous: Native Visions Reimagined in Glass is a groundbreaking exhibition of works in glass by Indigenous artists. Co-curated by Dr. Letitia Chambers and Cathy Short (Citizen Potawatomi) and on view at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe through June 22, 2022, the stunning art in the exhibit embodies the intellectual content of Native traditions expressed in glass.