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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).
Andrew Wice (opens in a new tab) is a novelist and screenwriter. He is the author of eight novels, including To The Last Drop (Bauu Press, 2008), and produced the acclaimed Madrid Oral History Tour, a smartphone-guided walking tour of the New Mexico town of Madrid.
By Andrew Wice With a fireball brighter than the New Mexican sun, matter flashed into energy at 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945. The world did not yet know it had been forever changed—even as hot, waxy ash began snowing on the dryland acres of Southern New Mexico’s Tularosa Basin. Controlling fire was humankind’s first milestone in technological evolution, but there is no single place where this discovery occurred.
By Andrew Wice This photograph celebrates the abundance of the Cerrillos coal beds, located about twenty-five miles south of Santa Fe. The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad built a railroad depot in Cerrillos in 1892, and was responsible for creating the infrastructure to harvest the precious fuel. This included establishing what would eventually become the mining town of Madrid, building the railhead hamlet of Waldo, and laying a 3-mile railroad spur to connect the two.
![A grayscale image of a persons ear and part of their head, with comic-style speech bubbles above the ear displaying words like AAH!, EEK!, UGH!, YIKE!, and OOF!. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/WordPlay_EekUgh-400x225.jpg)
By Andrew Wice The notion that our left brain determines analytic deduction while the right brain fosters emotional perception remains useful as a metaphor if not as a neurological reality. In that model, the right brain would assess the feelings aroused by a vermillion octagon overlaid with white runes, while the left brain would instead recognize a stop sign. When text and image are combined in a single work of art, these adversarial modes of thinking collide in the intersection, and never the same way twice.
