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).

Arthur Sze

Arthur Sze (opens in a new tab) is the twenty-fifth United States Poet Laureate. Sze was born in New York City in 1950 to Chinese immigrants. He is the author of twelve poetry collections, most recently Into the Hush (2025), as well as the prose collection The White Orchard: Selected Interviews, Essays, and Poems (2025).

An older man in a light blue shirt sits at a desk, typing on a typewriter in a spacious, book-filled home office.

A selection of Arthur Sze’s poetry

LeaflessSunlight strikes the leafless aspen branches,strikes the white picket fence, and as Ilook at highlighted edges, my eyes sting.Tufted grass stalks sway in the flooding rays,and, in the poinsettia of this hour, I needsome darkness to bloom: in this spacea snow leopard leaps among rocks,the rosettes of its fur a moving landscape;its hunger scents the air. As I exhale,a blue-throated hillstar sips from a Chuquiraguaflower, a fly agaric pushes out of soil,a raccoon scampers backward down an elm—we are always running from and lunging to;when we stop, the eagle featherof this pause blesses.

An older man walks through a field of leafless trees with a white dog on a grassy path during daylight.

Arthur Sze

Read six selected Sze poems published in this issue here. At age twenty-one, Arthur Sze hitchhiked from El Paso to Santa Fe in a single day. Knowing no one, and accompanied only by his boundless curiosity, he arrived seeking a place to build a life as a poet. Fifty-three years later, he hasn’t left. And his plans for becoming a poet clearly came to fruition.

A flat-topped hill rises above a gently sloping landscape with scattered trees under a clear blue sky. [gen-ai]

Verses to an Institution

WHAT'S NOT LOST Something happens when there is an absence of foundation there is a direction chosen where heart, intent, and desire, meet intuition—where preservation meets development meets community to set a precedent for instances in which the likes of MOMA follow suit. Architecture and ancient character conversing as if they’re of two different tongues but translation isn’t lost altogether— instead a romantic erosion set in motion a revival that was and remains inherently difficult.