Leslie Marmon Silko

After attending the Bureau of Indian Affairs school in Laguna and a Catholic school in Albuquerque, Leslie Marmon Silko graduated from the University of New Mexico, enrolled in and then dropped out of law school, and then published her first book of poems, Laguna Woman, in 1974 and her first novel, Ceremony, in 1977. About the communal aspect of a traditional Laguna Pueblo education, Silko once said, “The older you are the more valued you are, but each person is valued. The oral tradition stays in the human brain, and then it is a collective effort in the recollection.”