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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).
Meridel Rubenstein (opens in a new tab) began her professional career in the early 1970s, evolving from single photographs to extended photographic works, multi-media installations, and environmental social practice. Her focus has been on intersections of nature and culture in relationship to ecological and social imbalance. Threads of ancient myth and the status of nature during periods of war have been woven throughout her projects for decades. Professor of art, photography, and ecology, Rubenstein has maintained her art studio in Santa Fe, New Mexico since 1975. She is currently an adjunct professor at the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University.
![A man in a hat and sunglasses sits in a chair, smoking, with a desert landscape and a large nuclear explosion painted on the wall behind him. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Nuclear-DisEnchantment_5-400x225.jpg)
BY LOIS P. RUDNICK [wonderplugin_slider id="133"] Perhaps in no other comparable area on earth are condensed so many contradictions, or manifested so clearly the opposite polarities of all life. The oldest forms of life discovered in this hemisphere and the newest agents of mass death. The Sun Temple of Mesa Verde and the nuclear fission laboratories of the Pajarito Plateau.
