About Leslie Marmon Silko
Leslie Marmon Silko (born March 5, 1948 in Albuquerque, New Mexico) is a Native American writer of Pueblo Laguna culture. Leslie Marmon Silko is the daughter of a Mexican-Anglo-American-Native American family and grew up on the Laguna Reservation, where she attended the local Native American school for a number of years. She is best known for her novel Ceremony, published in 1977. She began to devote herself to writing in the 1970s. Her first published work was a collection of poetry, Laguna Women, which appeared in 1974. She published her first two stories, Tony's Story and The Man to Send Rain Clouds, in 1969. In 1974 she published her first book, Laguna Women Poems.She was also a teacher at the Navajo Community College in Tsaile, Arizona, then she settled in Alaska from 1973. In 1977, her best known and most commented work, Ceremony, was published. It mixes mythical stories and realistic stories, and also evokes the atomic bomb tests on the Alamogordo firing range, the Trinity Site. She returned to live in Tucson, Arizona, in 1978, and taught there at the university. Other publications follow: novels, collections of poetry, or association of poems, short stories and autobiographical accounts like Storyteller, published in 1981. She returned to settle in the Laguna Pueblo reserve.
In 1981 she was a MacArthur Fellow. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001 and to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2021.
She lives in Tucson, Arizona.
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