New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs welcomes you to subscribe and support our state’s cultural treasures.
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).
Mariko O. Thomas is an independent scholar, instructor, and writer who moves between Arroyo Seco, New Mexico, and Whidbey Island, Washington. She has a PhD in Environmental Communication from University of New Mexico and researches plant-human relationships, environmental justice, and storytelling. Thomas is also co-founder of an arts and ecology collaborative called Submergence Collective, an associate editor for the academic journal Plant Perspectives, faculty at Skagit Valley College, and pretty decent at reciting fairy tales.
In her 1988 collection, Favorite Folktales from Around the World, the folklorist Jane Yolen introduced humans as the primary source of stories, writing that, “Only humans can create tales that change or structure the world in which they live.” However, this statement is challenged by the menagerie of beings which painter and sculptor Eliza Naranjo Morse calls forth in her art.
