Leslie Marmon Silko

Silko grew up at Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico, raised partly by her great-grandmother and aunts on the oral stories that would later structure her fiction, and studied at the University of New Mexico before briefly attending law school and abandoning it for writing. She wrote much of Ceremony while living far from Laguna, in Ketchikan, Alaska, working from memory and homesickness as much as research.

The novel interleaves prose narrative with passages of verse drawn from Laguna storytelling tradition, treating the act of narration itself as a healing ceremony for its shellshocked veteran protagonist. She became a MacArthur Fellow in 1981 and followed Ceremony years later with Almanac of the Dead, a vast, unsparing novel spanning five centuries of colonization across the Americas.

She has continued to write and teach while remaining closely tied to Laguna Pueblo and the Southwest landscape that grounds all her fiction.