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).
Rachel Preston
Rachel Preston (opens in a new tab) is the director of The Ministry of Architecture in Santa Fe. She has documented historic buildings across New Mexico and produced documentaries about architecture at Acoma and Bandelier. She writes, teaches, and speaks about New Mexico’s thousand-year tradition of sustainable design.
Tutto il Mondo è Paese
By Rachel Preston More than one of New Mexico’s great stories starts with a broken wheel… and the account of the Museum of International Folk Art is one of them. Its founder, Florence Dibell Bartlett, got her first taste of New Mexico’s quaint and cordial village life—a style of living perhaps the polar opposite to that of the wealthy hardware heiress and world traveler in 1920’s Chicago—while awaiting a wagon tire repair in Santa Cruz, and she was hooked.
![A man wearing glasses and a bow tie stands beside a scale model of a modern building, with large windows and a landscape visible in the background. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Meem_Meem-400x225.jpg)
A Gift for Sketching Buildings
By Rachel Preston In the 1930s, the Great Depression had wiped out economies and careers. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal would offer up programs in craft, design, construction, and art that would eventually put more than half of New Mexico’s population—more than 200,000 people—back to work. One New Mexican architect would rise to the occasion, finding ways to empower communities across the state, right as he hit his stride in a career that would come to define mid-century New Mexico design.