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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).
Paul Reed has been a preservation archaeologist with Archaeology Southwest since 2001. He lives north of Taos, New Mexico. Reed co-edited, with Gary M. Brown, Aztec, Salmon, and the Pueblo Heartland of the Middle San Juan (SAR Press, 2018). During the last six years, Reed has been working to protect the Greater Chaco Landscape from the effects of expanded oil-gas development associated with fracking in the Mancos Shale formation.
![Several people stand atop and beside crumbling stone ruins in a rocky, overgrown landscape under a partly cloudy sky. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/12-2-2-400x225.jpg)
By Paul Reed “Our churches are being attacked and our people can’t go to them to pray. It’s a fight against white men with gold in their eyes.”—Suzan Shown Harjo (Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee) In this tumultuous year of 2020, the wind whistles through an apparently vacant Chacoan landscape, dominated by uplifted sandstone mesas and a few solitary buttes. Above, the sky is a perfect azure, radiant blue contrasting with the soon-to-be-hot morning sun.
