August 22, 2006
Leslie Marmon Silko
“It’s
stories that make this a community,” Leslie Marmon Silko has remarked about the Native American world of the Laguna Pueblo, New Mexico, in which she grew up, and in five books—Laguna Women (1974), Ceremony (1977), Storyteller (1981), Almanac of the Dead (1991), and Yellow Woman (1993)—she has told and retold the tales that, she believes, make her people who they are. Of mixed Native American, Mexican, and Caucasian descent, Leslie Marmon attended Bureau of Indian Affairs schools at Laguna until entering high school, then studied at the University of New Mexico and later matriculated in law school before deciding to do graduate work in English and devote herself to a literary career. Divorced from John Silko, she has taught at Navajo Community College in Arizona and at the University of New Mexico, is the mother of two sons, and has been the recent recipient of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship. Her ceremonial impulse to tell stories that are both self-defining and celebratory of her community has issued in an art that employs many forms: poetry, short stories, legendary tales, a novel, and most recently, film scripts.
From: The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. Ed. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. 2nd Ed. New York: Norton & Co., 1985. 2327-8