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).

Jim O’Donnell

Jim O’Donnell (opens in a new tab) is a writer, photographer, and educator living in Taos, New Mexico. A former archaeologist and conservation advocate, he writes about landscape, memory, water, deep time, and the evolving relationship between people and place. His work is rooted in the American West, where he explores both what remains and what has disappeared from the land. He is the author of Fountain Creek: Big Lessons from a Little River, Notes for the Aurora Society: 1500 Miles on Foot Across Finland, and Wild Waters: Passport to New Mexico Rivers. He is currently at work on a series of essays and books examining ecological memory, pilgrimage, and the stories carried by landscapes. He teaches at Taos High School.

illustration of ancient times in full color - three guards on the roof, a hunter with a catch speaks with a female figure weaving at her loom

Feet, sandals,and the power of political agency in the ancient southwest

Illustrations by Marty Two Bulls Sr. Eight hundred years ago, something profoundly interesting happened in the American Southwest. Over the course of about one hundred years, the Puebloan world consciously transformed itself from a stratified hierarchical society to a system with no apparent markers of classor status. In our current state of political and climate chaos and anxiety, the experiences of Ancestral Puebloan people teach us that deep societal change is possible.

Artist’s conceptualization of life at Lake Otero. Missing from the image are trees. Researchers believe that the area was forested with pine, spruce and cottonwood, among other species. Research on pollens from the footprint layers is ongoing, with results expected next year. Image by Karen Carr; courtesy of the National Park Service.

History, Science, Mythology, and the First Americans

A young woman hurried across the flat, trailing footprints. At times she slipped. At times she stretched to cross a puddle. She carried a child and possibly a container for water, or food, or perhaps a bag of firewood or stones for making tools. The ditch grass, a thin herb growing in the wet lakeshore mud, had gone to seed. As the woman walked, she squished the tiny seeds into the mud.

A man stands beside a horse-drawn wagon loaded with crops in a plowed field under a clear sky. [gen-ai]

I Change into My Levi’s That I Bought With Last Year’s Potato Harvest Money

By Jim O’Donnell Rosie left for Colorado when she was 6 months old. Her family travelled by covered wagon, crossing the mountains and making their way north. The year was 1921. José Delores Cordova, Rosie’s father and a recently returned veteran of the First World War, simply couldn’t make ends meet farming and ranching the high desert plateau north of Taos, New Mexico.

A person stands on a rooftop overlooking adobe buildings and wooden structures, with forested mountains in the background under a clear sky. [gen-ai]

Land Back

By Jim O'Donnell On a frigid February day in 2019, representatives from New Mexico’s Carson National Forest and the Taos Ski Valley invited members of Taos Pueblo to join them on a ride to the top of Kachina Peak. Kachina is a rocky, snow-dressed 12,841-foot mountain that towers over Taos’ world-famous ski resort. It is also an important spiritual landmark for the people of Taos Pueblo.