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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).
Michael Romero Taylor has been working in historic preservation for the last thirty-seven years. His experience includes historic site management, architectural conservation, management of cultural routes, museum/visitor center management, and the preservation of archaeological sites. He currently works as a National Park Service cultural resource specialist for nine congressionally designated national historic trails in the United States. Taylor is a sixteenth-generation New Mexican, whose family is descended from those who came up with Juan de Oñate’s colonizing expedition of 1598, and from those who helped shape the histories of the three national historic trails that converge in Santa Fe.
![Ruins of adobe structures stand in front of leafless trees with arid, rocky hills rising in the background under a clear blue sky. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Bloodlines_3-400x225.jpg)
BY MACHAEL ROMERO TAYLOR We are all descended from adventurers who traveled in search of opportunities and new lands to settle. This itch for travel has always been in our genes. Millennia before the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, countless American Indian roads and trails existed, and many still exist. [wonderplugin_slider id="97"] (more…)
