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).

Petra Salazar

Petra Salazar (opens in a new tab) is a coyote (regional term for an Indohispano/Anglo racial identity) from Española, New Mexico, aka “Spaña.” She teaches children at a Montessori school and adults at philopoetics.com. Petra’s work has been published or is forthcoming in Colorado Review, Indiana Review, Sonora Review, The Southampton Review, Latin American Literature Today, and elsewhere.

Aztlán

The City of Española, New Mexico, officially turns one hundred years old this year. But the land and people of the valley tell a deeper story—one that slips past the barbed-wire borders of time, place, and stereotype, refusing to be hemmed in by the bias of public imagination. The centennial fiestas in September offer more than municipal commemoration—they are an opportunity to honor nuestra querencia: our belonging to the land and lifeways that have sustained valley communities for millennia.

A row of wooden turntables with vinyl records are displayed on blue pedestals in a modern art gallery with a blue wall in the background. [gen-ai]

¡Oye Primos!

By Petra Salazar How do we survive the uncertainty of our globalized, techno-digital age? Listen for answers in the sounds and stories of the Borderlands. The border is not just a geographic location, but something embodied in people who dwell on the border of conflicting identities. In the U.S. Southwest, the region referred to in Chicano philosophy as Aztlán, the border is a place where we find a confluence of diverse Indohispano perspectives, blending Indigenous and Spanish ways of knowing.

A full moon shines in a starry night sky above silhouetted mountains with a faint orange glow on the horizon. [gen-ai]

Summer Poetry

Ana Castillo What Is Your Writing Process? With mop in one hand,cocktail in the other,at 9:00 a.m. or night,flies swatted,roach corpses swept.Lola Beltrán belts “Mi ranchito”through the house speakersfrom room to room.I hum off key.Mares fed, dogs let out,sun beating on the flat roof,moon rising behind a cloud—verses take form. If I Pray One morning I heard on the radio a boy named Trayvon was shot dead.Bent over, slipping on shoes, vertigo took hold.