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).
Darryl Lorenzo Wellington is the sixth poet laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico. His collection is Legible Walls: Poems for Santa Fe Murals. Wellington enjoys working for the Alto Arts Integration program where he teaches poetry in the Santa Fe Public Schools.
Mysterious, mercurial, hard-to-pin down sociologically or racially—and even described as being unbearably vain and pretentious—why is Jean Toomer important? My attention turned to him shortly after I became the 2021-2023 poet laureate of Santa Fe. I researched Toomer while looking for Black literary precursors, given that he is one of the few figures in African American literature who has written about this region.
![An old, dark building stands on a corner at night, illuminated by a single streetlamp on an empty, cobblestone street. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/iStock-1169745137-400x225.jpg)
Easy Street. Or, The Year of Getting a Driver’s License and Exciting Eldritch Regions of Consciousness Taking a cue from the sweet effluvium or (so-called) sickle moon, maybe “the dead of night” is no valley of bones, just a figure of speech, the young kid itches to take the family car under screaming streetlamps on a spin; his soul escapes the house like air whizzing from an unknotted balloon, or a space craft hovering in pursuit of the facts which can be drawn from a colorful expression.
