Spring 2026

2026 / Vol. 131 / No. 1

This issue is a celebration of poetry and deep love for New Mexico.

Santa Fe poet, Kathryne Lim, provides an insightful profile of longtime Santa Fe resident and new U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze, along with six of his poems.
Albuquerque Poet Laureate Emerita Hakim Bellamy profiles fellow slam poet and new New Mexico Poet Laureate, Manuel González, along with one of his celebrated poems.
Michelle Laflamme-Childs of New Mexico Arts and New Mexico Poet Laureate Emerita, Lauren Camp, share their process for collecting and collaging community poems across the state for their Epic Poem Project, and share six community. poems from Gallup, Raton, Mountainair, Lincoln County, Artesia, and Deming.
A profile of the curator and art writer Lucy Lippard by Chelsey Johnson.
An article by Dr. Christina Castro about the ways Indigenous artists are blending art and environmental activism in their work, as reflected in the Essential Elements exhibition at the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture.

See all articles from this issue below. And to locate articles from previous issues, visit El Palacio‘s online library.

Art as Inheritance

Poetry is my inheritance. My dad, raised by Scottish immigrants in New York City, was taught by Catholic nuns to memorize poetry. He passed the practice on to me; I remember standing at the edge of the Pecos Wilderness as a child, repeating the lines of “The Fairies,” by William Allingham, until I could recite it by heart. I still carry the words in my body, the rhythm of each line urging a steady onward march despite the poem’s dark elements.

By Emily Withnall

Categories: Editor's Letter

Close-up of a wild boar facing the camera with detailed fur and snout, set against a warm, softly blurred background with golden tones.

From Javelinas to Oil Refineries: Building the New Mexico Epic Poem Project One Community at a Time

Lauren Camp: The goal was to go everywhere, county to county across the state, reaching many small, rural communities. I started in Alamogordo, in the south-central part of New Mexico, reading poems and answering questions, then watching with delight as everyone in the vast crowd wrote in response to a prompt I gave. The next day, I watched the dunes shift at White Sands, restoring, remaking.

By Lauren Camp and Michelle Laflamme-Childs

Categories: Poetry

Aerial view of two people standing inside a large, circular concrete structure casting shadows, surrounded by dry terrain and sparse vegetation.

Arroyo Lessons

I write letters to my father, the riverbed, when I need answers that mother can’t give. Father empty stream, father arroyo, who houses the rattlesnake beneath his wind-smoothed stones. Father imminent danger, the flash flood, the whipping monsoon mud froth, father aftermath in ribbons of ruined earth. The arroyo spreads his tiger moth wings and paints his back in dark, tide-pulled streaks of metallic silt.

By Adrienne Rugg

Categories: Framework

An older person sits in an orange armchair using a laptop in a bright, yellow-walled room with bookshelves, a couch, and stacked books.

The Counterculture’s Curator: Lucy Lippard on Writing, Art and Life

If you know anything about Lucy Lippard, you know she’s one of the most significant art writers and curators of our time. You may know her thirty published books and countless essays on artists, art movements, and land. You may know her as a cofounder of the legendary artists’ book space, Printed Matter, the feminist art collectives Heresies and the Ad Hoc Women’s Committee, or any number of groups that rose up in the latter half of the twentieth century to fight institutional gatekeepers for fair inclusion of women and people of color.

By Chelsey Johnson

Categories: Artist profiles

What Happens to the Land, Happens to the People

Indigenous Artists in the Movement to Protect Their Homelands Embedded in the mountainscape are pages from a large-scale printing of the Declaration of Independence. The bottom half of the pages are intentionally singed as they meld into distinctly pueblo black and white line work, accentuated by two cornstalks and a prickly-pear cactus at the center with ripe red fruit, seemingly ready for picking.

By Dr. Christina M. Castro (Taos & Jemez Pueblos)

Categories: Featured

A city skyline with mid-rise buildings is set against a backdrop of mountains under a partly cloudy sky, with trees in the foreground.

Ritual. Vessel. Volcano. Vision.

Read the profile of New Mexico State Poet Laureate Manuel González, here. Albuquerque, this is healing, reclamation. We sanctify the soil, We are more than crime statistics. We are San Jose sunrises, Barelas barrio alchemy, Central Avenue gospel painting hope in bold strokes of dawn. The blue light of the magic hour. From Tramway to Old Town's soul, To the west mesa We carry medicine in our stride.

By Manuel González

Categories: Poetry

A stack of handmade, illustrated booklets with colorful taped spines and various cover designs, arranged on a white background.

A Higher Purpose: Why the state poet laureateship is about more than poetry

Read the poem, Ritual. Vessel. Volcano. Vision. The coffee shop was unusually packed with regulars for 7 p.m. on a Wednesday. There was a mix of folks, some looking like they’d been there for a while, entire book bags of belongings sprawled across tables. A noticeably larger group—appearing to be recent arrivals—were obviously there for something that would start soon. In short order, the Mega All-Ages (MAS) Poetry Slam host would secure five judges at random from audience members who committed to staying for the duration of the event.

By Hakim Bellamy and Manuel González

Categories: Poetry

An older man in a light blue shirt sits at a desk, typing on a typewriter in a spacious, book-filled home office.

A selection of Arthur Sze’s poetry

LeaflessSunlight strikes the leafless aspen branches,strikes the white picket fence, and as Ilook at highlighted edges, my eyes sting.Tufted grass stalks sway in the flooding rays,and, in the poinsettia of this hour, I needsome darkness to bloom: in this spacea snow leopard leaps among rocks,the rosettes of its fur a moving landscape;its hunger scents the air. As I exhale,a blue-throated hillstar sips from a Chuquiraguaflower, a fly agaric pushes out of soil,a raccoon scampers backward down an elm—we are always running from and lunging to;when we stop, the eagle featherof this pause blesses.

By Arthur Sze

Categories: Poetry

An older man walks through a field of leafless trees with a white dog on a grassy path during daylight.

Arthur Sze

Read six selected Sze poems published in this issue here. At age twenty-one, Arthur Sze hitchhiked from El Paso to Santa Fe in a single day. Knowing no one, and accompanied only by his boundless curiosity, he arrived seeking a place to build a life as a poet. Fifty-three years later, he hasn’t left. And his plans for becoming a poet clearly came to fruition.

By Kathryne Lim and Arthur Sze

Photographs by Don J. Usner

Categories: Artist profiles, Featured, Poetry