Leslie Marmon Silko is a critically acclaimed Native American author. Her mother, Mary Virginia Leslie, was part Cherokee and part Anglo, and her father, Leland Howard Marmon, was a mixed race Laguna Pueblo Indian. The Laguna Pueblo Indians are a tribe located in west central New Mexico. They take their name from the lake located on their reservation (“Laguna” means “lake” in Spanish). Leslie Marmon was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on March 5, 1948, and grew up near the Laguna Pueblo, northwest of Albuquerque. Because of her mixed heritage, she was not completely accepted into the Laguna tribe. Silko’s biographer Per Seyersted writes that Silko’s family “was included in clan activities but not to the same extent as full bloods." Nevertheless, the Laguna culture left deep impressions on her, and she often describes the beauty of the landscape that surrounded her childhood home on the Laguna Pueblo in her fiction and poetry. As a result of her mixed heritage, the challenges she faced growing up as a “mixed-blood” appear often as autobiographical elements in much of her writing. She explains that “the core of my writing is the attempt to identify what it is to be a half-breed or a mixed-blooded person; what it is to grow up neither white nor fully traditional Indian."

The Marmon family emphasized education and because the Indian school at the Laguna Pueblo was not very strong academically, Leslie attended a private school in Albuquerque. She went on to attend the University of New Mexico where she met her first husband, Richard Chapman. They married in 1966 and later that year, she had her first son, Robert William. Leslie and her husband divorced in 1969, the same year that she graduated summa cum laude in English from the University of New Mexico. She also published her first short story that year, “The Man to Send Rainclouds,” which she began in a creative writing class. After graduating from the University of New Mexico, Leslie was accepted into that institution’s American Indian Law School Fellowship Program. She dropped out of law school after three semesters because, in her words, the legal system “was designed by and for the feudal lords” and only meted out justice “to the rich and powerful.” She remarried an attorney, John Silko, in 1971 and began her career as a full-time writer. Her second son, Cazimir, was born in 1972.

Silko published her first book, a collection of poetry titled Laguna Woman, in 1974. The work was very successful and received critical acclaim for the beauty of the language and the way in which she blended the magnificent landscapes of her childhood into the Laguna myths and folklore. The poems were the first published to reveal a uniquely Pueblo worldview which included sharp criticism of American colonialism that would continue to be her preferred theme in future writings. Silko traveled to Alaska in 1973 where she wrote her first novel, Ceremony. In it, Silko was able to weave together the many stories of Laguna folklore that she had heard since childhood. Silko received excellent reviews for her novel, and many critics and scholars believed her to be the most accomplished Native American author of her generation. Ceremony continues to be one of her most successful works and is taught in colleges and universities nationally and internationally.

In 1980, Silko experienced two tragedies. She and her husband went through a bitter divorce and her longtime correspondent and mentor, the poet James Wright, suddenly died. Although well-established as a writer, it took Silko ten years to complete her second novel, Almanac of the Dead. As...