During the early 1970s -- the emergent years of what Kenneth Lincoln has called the "Native American Renaissance" -- Leslie Marmon Silko was perhaps the movement's preeminent writer of short fiction. She had also published a collection of highly regarded poems, Laguna Woman (1974). Yet it was the publication of her novel Ceremony (1977) that confirmed her position among American Indian writers of the late twentieth century. Subsequent books -- including Storyteller (1981), stories and poetry unified around her interest in the continuity of verbal art at her native Laguna Pueblo; Almanac of the Dead (1991), a novel; the self-published Sacred Water (1993), a collection of prose pieces dealing with the role of water in the arid Southwest; and Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit (1996), a collection of nonfiction -- have continued to develop the themes that Silko introduced into her earliest fiction and poetry.

Leslie Marmon Silko was born on...