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).

Laura Paskus

Laura Paskus (opens in a new tab) is a writer based in New Mexico. She’s the author of At the Precipice: New Mexico’s Changing Climate and editor of Water Bodies: Love Letters to the Most Abundant Substance on Earth. Paskus started her journalism career at High Country News in 2002 and worked for print, online, radio, and television news outlets, covering the most important environmental issues of her generation, including climate change, wildfire, water, and the military’s contamination of groundwater with PFAS. Most recently, she produced and hosted Our Land: New Mexico’s Environmental Past, Present and Future for eight seasons on New Mexico PBS.

Two people walk beside a donkey on a dirt road near a wooden fence and rocky landscape under a cloudy sky.

Connecting Time, Place, and People

On a warm August morning about 150 years ago, the people who lived on the sandstone promontory above Di’ Chuuna would have looked east at the slumbering lines of Kaweshtima.  Even with the summer harvest underway, they might have wondered when snow would start draping the mountain. Today, the people of Acoma still time spring plantings to the shifting of that white shawl, so that when snowmelt arrives in Di’ Chuuna and the ancient irrigation canals, they are ready.