High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Leslie Marmon Silko (born Leslie Marmon on March 5, 1948 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to photographer Leland Howard Marmon and Mary Virginia Leslie) is a Native American writer of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, and one of the key figures in the second wave of what Kenneth Lincoln has called the Native American Renaissance. She was one of the original recipients of the MacArthur Foundation Grant later known as the "Genius Grant" in 1981 and the Native Writers` Circle of the Americas Lifetime Achievement Award in 1994.