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).

Hannah Sherk

Hannah Sherk (opens in a new tab) is an English teacher, writer, and editor living in Portland, Oregon. She attended St. John’s College in Santa Fe before finishing her BA in sociology and anthropology in North Carolina.

A copper medallion found at Coronado Historic Site was one of the items examined with confocal X-Ray fluorescence (XRF) technology by scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Inside Out

By Hannah Sherk Los Alamos National Laboratory typically calls to mind cutting-edge advances in national security, but a recent project had its scientists looking back to a nearly 500-year-old conflict. LANL chemists, in a partnership with archaeologists from the Coronado Institute, are using high-tech instruments to examine artifacts from a long-buried battle.  In 2018, after sixteen months of careful searching, a metal detector survey unearthed a trove of artifacts at Coronado Historic Site in Bernalillo.