Even before the publication of her novel Ceremony (1977), Leslie Marmon Silko had become recognized as one of the preeminent figures in what Kenneth Lincoln calls the Native American Renaissance -- the literary movement that began in the late 1960s among American Indian writers who draw on their tribal verbal art heritages to inform their poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. In the early 1970s Silko was perhaps this movement's most prominent writer of short fiction, and she had also published some highly regarded poems. Ceremony confirmed her position among contemporary Native American writers, and subsequent books, especially Storyteller (1981), have not disappointed her readers. Though not as favorably received as her earlier works, Silko's most recent novel, Almanac of the Dead (1991), continues to develop some of the themes that have characterized her poetry and fiction.

Leslie Marmon Silko was born 5 March 1948 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and grew up in Old Laguna...