Leslie Marmon Silko

Leslie Marmon Silko (born March 5, 1948, Albuquerque, New Mexico, U.S.) is an American poet and novelist whose work often centers on the dissonance between Native and white cultures. Her best-known work is the novel Ceremony (1977), which is considered a seminal work of Native literature.

(Read Britannica’s essay “13 Great Indigenous Writers to Read and Celebrate.”)

Early life and writing

Born Leslie Marmon, of mixed Laguna Pueblo, white, and Mexican ancestry, she grew up on the Laguna Pueblo reservation in New Mexico, where she learned Laguna traditions and myths. Her father, Leland (Lee) Marmon, was a photographer and a World War II veteran, and her mother, Mary Virginia Leslie, was a teacher. Marmon attended Bureau of Indian Affairs schools and learned storytelling from the elders in her community, including her grandmother and great-grandmother. In 1965 she married Richard Chapman, and three years later she published her first short story, “The Man to Send Rain Clouds,” under the name Leslie Chapman. She and Chapman divorced in 1969.

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After graduating with honors from the University of New Mexico (B.A., 1969), she entered law school but abandoned her legal studies to do graduate work in English and pursue a writing career. She married John Silko in 1971 and retained his surname after they divorced.

Silko published several more short stories and the poetry collection Laguna Woman (1974). Often referred to as the premier Native American writer of her generation, she frequently drew on the Laguna stories she had heard in childhood, combining concerns of Laguna spirituality, such as the relationship between human beings and the natural elements, with complex portrayals of contemporary struggles to retain Native culture in an Anglo world.

Ceremony

Silko published the novel Ceremony to great critical acclaim. It tells the story of the relationship between a returning World War II veteran of mixed Laguna and Anglo heritage and a tribal wise man who teaches him Laguna folklore and ceremonies that help him heal the psychic wounds caused by war. Apart from Silko’s close observation of human nature, Ceremony is noted for its nonchronological narrative.

Silko wrote Ceremony while living in Alaska with her second husband, and she has revealed in numerous interviews that the book reflects her homesickness for New Mexico. In 2010 she told the Chicago Tribune, “I basically tried to remake, from the ground up, the homeland that I missed so much. The detail and attention to the landscape and the sky might not have been so central had I been living in New Mexico at the time.” The book continues to be influential among new generations of Native writers. In 2024 novelist Tommy Orange wrote in the foreword of a new edition of Ceremony that it “is doing so much I had never read and still continue to not find in fiction—a combination of old stories and new stories, of prayer and spell and poem and song, but always, always doing the work of storytelling.”

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Other works

In 1981 Silko received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship and published Storyteller, which includes poetry, tribal stories, fiction, and photographs. The Delicacy and Strength of Lace (1985), a selection of correspondence between herself and nature poet James Wright, followed. Silko’s second novel, Almanac of the Dead (1991), explores themes similar to those found in Ceremony, this time through the lives of two Native women and with a more apocalyptic view of contemporary society. Its sprawling narrative covers five centuries, addressing the widespread displacement of Indigenous peoples. The book was polarizing among some critics. In his review in Newsweek, literary critic Malcolm Jones, Jr., wrote, “Silko isn’t keen on fairness. In her cosmology, there are good people and there are white people.” Novelist Toni Morrison, however, called Almanac of the Dead “splendid” and added, “I can’t stress too much how happy I am to have this book in the world.”

Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit (1996) is a collection of Silko’s essays on contemporary Native life. In 1999 she released Gardens in the Dunes, a novel about a Native girl who, having been captured by soldiers and separated from her family in the late 19th century, struggles to retain her culture’s traditions. The Turquoise Ledge (2010) is a memoir. In 2011 Silko published the novella Oceanstory as an e-book on Kindle. Set partly in Tucson, Arizona, and partly in a seaside town in Mexico, it examines such themes as paranoia and the falsehood of the American Dream.