Leslie Marmon Silko

Leslie Marmon Silko came to national attention via her first book of poems, Laguna Woman (1974), which drew heavily from the legends she learned growing up on New Mexico's Laguna Pueblo. When her acclaimed novel Ceremony was published in 1977, she was hailed as the first American Indian woman novelist. Silko's work is synthetic and often broad in scope. Her montage Storyteller (1989) combined poetry, fiction, memoir, legend, and photographs to depict her family history. She was the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, which allowed her to devote herself fulltime to writing the novel, Almanac of the Dead (1992). Silko, who is part Laguna Pueblo, part Mexican, and part Anglo, has lived and taught in Arizona since 1978.