Happy Birthday, Leslie Marmon Silko

Born March 5, 1948, Albuquerque, NM

Today, the Best American Essays newsletter celebrates the seventy-seventh birthday of storyteller, novelist, and essayist Leslie Marmon Silko. Among the honors she has received are a McArthur Foundation grant in 1981 and the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas Lifetime Achievement Award in 1994.

Subscribe to our newsletter for news about upcoming online conversations with Best American Essays contributors about essayists.

Leslie Marmon Silko’s Storyteller (1981) is a hybrid of poems, stories, and autobiography.

"Old stories and new stories are essential: They tell us who we are, and they enable us to survive. We thank all the ancestors, and we thank all those people who keep on telling stories generation after generation, because if you don't have the stories, you don't have anything,"

Leslie Marmon Silko, from the cover of “Yellow Woman,” edited by Melody Graulich, Rutgers University Press, 1993.

“I think of storytelling as a part of healing. The body of healing stories and storytelling are held communally and are practiced together and always have been.”

Ceremony (Penguin, 1977) was Silko’s debut novel, which garnered critical acclaim. Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit (Simon & Schuster, 1997) collects Silko’s essays. Almanac of the Dead (Simon & Schuster, 1991) was Silko’s second novel.

First published essay:

• “An Old-Fashioned Indian Attack in Two Parts,” in The Remembered Earth: An Anthology of Contemporary Native American Literature, edited by Gary Hobson (University of New Mexico Press, 1979; rpt., 1981).

Select nonfiction bibliography:

• The Turquoise Ledge: A Memoir (Penguin Random House, 2011)

• Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit: Essays on Native American Life Today (Simon and Schuster, 1997).

• The Delicacy and Strength of Lace: Letters Between Leslie Marmon Silko and James Wright (Graywolf, 1985).

See also:

Visit the collection of Leslie Marmon Silko papers at Yale University.

Watch An Evening with Leslie Marmon Silko, Arizona State University, 2011.

Watch a short interview about Silko’s memoir The Turquoise Ledge, Zócalo Public Square, 2010.

Watch Leslie Marmon Silko at the NYS Writers Institute, 2007.

Read an interview with Leslie Marmon Silko by Ismail Ibrahim, The New Yorker, 2023.