It’s the birthday of poet, novelist, and essayist Leslie Marmon Silko (b. 1948), one of the most important writers of the Native American literary renaissance of the last century and the only person I’ve ever heard of to have a pet rattlesnake. So there’s that.

Silko, who is Laguna Pueblo, Mexican, and white, grew up on the Laguna Pueblo reservation in New Mexico. Her father was a talented photographer and was taking her deer hunting by the time she was seven. Silko first went to school on the reservation but transferred to a Catholic school in Albuquerque in fifth grade; her experience there was fairly positive. The school was strictly against teasing and while Silko felt that it was an alien environment, she didn’t experience any vicious racism. She got her B.A. from the University of New Mexico in 1969, where one of her professors was Tony Hillerman. Silko began publishing stories and then winning big buttery handfuls of awards, starting with a National Endowment for the Arts Discovery Grant and eventually a MacArthur “Genius” Award (1981). At that point she ditched teaching to write full-time.

Silko’s first novel was the critically acclaimed Ceremony (1977), which tells the story of a half-breed veteran returning to a reservation after WWII and the Laguna rituals and lore that ultimately heal him; author Sherman Alexie said in a 2013 interview that Ceremony was his favorite Native American work. Silko worked on the novel while living in Alaska for two years with her then-husband, lawyer John Silko. She was terribly homesick and worked hard in the novel to recreate the landscape she was missing. Ceremony is one of the most widely read Native American novels and continues to be used in many college curriculums.

Silko’s next novel, Almanac of the Dead (1991) took ten years to write and covers five centuries. In the meantime, she brought out her story and poetry collection, Storyteller (1981), which garnered a terrific review by N. Scott Momaday. Silko’s correspondence with close friend, poet James Wright, was published in 1986 as Delicacy and Strength of Lace. Silko has published a number of other books as well, including The Turquoise Ledge: A Memoir (2010).

Silko has been married and divorced twice, has two sons, and lives in Tucson, Arizona, with a plethora of pets, including “six English Mastiffs, one pit bull, seven birds, one rattlesnake and a favored parrot named Gray Bird…” (“Author Silko makes a point to tell story,” Nina Metz, chicagotribune.com, Oct. 16, 2010). I’m just going to say it: that’s plenty of Mastiffs and too many rattlesnakes. But then, I’m not really a rattlesnake person.

Have a splendid Tuesday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.