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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).
Marianna Shreve Simpson has been a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, and has published, taught, and lectured widely on medieval and early modern Islamic art in general and the arts of the book (especially Persian illustrated manuscripts) in particular. She has held many curatorial and director positions in her career, the most recent being a guest curator at the Princeton University Art Museum. Her books include Princeton’s Great Book of Kings: The Peck Shahnama (Princeton University Art Museum, 2015); Persian Poetry, Painting, and Patronage: Illustrations in a Sixteenth-Century Masterpiece (Yale University Press and Freer Gallery of Art, 1998); and Sultan Ibrahim Mirza’s “Haft Awrang”: A Princely Manuscript from Sixteenth-Century Iran (Yale University Press and Freer Gallery of Art, 1997).
![A rectangular textile featuring a repeating geometric and floral pattern in red and gold tones, arranged in vertical columns and horizontal rows. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Five-Barrels_1-400x225.jpg)
BY MARIANNA SHREVE SIMPSON On April 8, 1614, Castilian nobleman Don García de Silva y Figueroa set sail from Lisbon as the emissary of Philip III, ruler of the Habsburg Dynasty of Spain and Portugal, to ‘Abbas I, ruler of the Safavid Dynasty of Iran. (more…)
