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El Palacio, the magazine published by the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs, has released its Winter 2025–26 issue and announced a public reading event featuring contributors to the new edition. The event is scheduled for Sunday, January 11, 2026, at FUSION | 708 in Albuquerque.
The winter issue focuses on how New Mexico’s landscapes, histories, and cultural traditions influence understanding of both past and future. In her editor’s note, Emily Withnall writes about the importance of these elements in shaping collective memory.
Articles in this edition include Laura Paskus’s report on an excavation at Acoma Pueblo that combined archaeological methods with Indigenous knowledge as part of an infrastructure project. Myrriah Gómez contributes a feature on women and children’s roles in the 1970s Chicano Movement in Las Vegas, N.M., highlighted through Adelita M. Medina’s photography. Rica Maestas offers an essay about two installations from SITE SANTA FE’s Once Within a Time exhibition at the Palace of the Governors that encourage visitors to reconsider power structures and assumptions about New Mexico history. Poet Santana Shorty presents “Sun Series,” focusing on daily experiences and their connection to land, community, ancestors, and future generations.
The upcoming event will have live readings by Paskus, Gómez, Maestas, and Shorty. Editor Emily Withnall will moderate a Q&A session following the readings. Attendees can purchase copies of the winter issue and books by participating writers.
Laura Paskus is based in Albuquerque and wrote At the Precipice: New Mexico’s Changing Climate. Myrriah Gómez is an associate professor at the University of New Mexico Honors College and author of Nuclear Nuevo México: Colonialism and the Effects of the Nuclear Industrial Complex on Nuevomexicanos. Rica Maestas is an artist and writer from Albuquerque whose work emphasizes lived experience and mutuality. Santana Shorty is a poet from Santa Fe who has been published in several outlets; she is a member of the Navajo Nation.
For more information or to view current or previous issues of El Palacio, visit elpalacio.org.
