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.

A man with short gray hair and glasses, wearing a collared shirt, looks at the camera against a black background.

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.

A woman with long dark hair wearing a coral shirt sits outdoors, resting her chin on her hand, with greenery and flowers in the background.

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.

A woman with straight brown hair wearing a dark turtleneck and long, beaded earrings poses against a plain white background.

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).

A woman with long dark hair wearing a coral shirt sits outdoors, resting her chin on her hand, with greenery and flowers in the background.

Deborah Jackson Taffa

Deborah Jackson Taffa (opens in a new tab) (Kwatsaan/Yuma and Laguna Pueblo) is the author of Whiskey Tender, which was a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for Nonfiction and was longlisted for the 2025 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. Named a top ten book of 2024 by The Atlantic and Time Magazine, the memoir won a 2025 International Latino Book Award. Director of the MFACW program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, Taffa has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN America, MacDowell, and most recently the Howard Foundation at Brown University for her novel-in-progress, All the Bones Have Fallen.   

color photo of two girls on tricycles in matching yellow outfits in the mid 70s

Almost Yuman (1972)

Remembering the Animas River helps me forget, at least for a moment, the challenges, fears, and feelings of inadequacy I experienced in my childhood. Memoria praeteritorum bonorum. My own set of rose-colored glasses. A trick of the mind that helps me highlight the peaceful days, the quiet ones that punctuated the violence, pressures, and confusion of being a Native girl in a northwestern New Mexico town where cowboys still hated Indians, and three White teenagers murdered three Native men just before my family and I moved there for my father’s new job.