William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright considered the greatest writer in the English language. He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564 and began his career as an actor and part owner of a playing company in London in the 1590s. Some of his most famous plays include Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Julius Caesar. He also wrote 154 sonnets and narrative poems including Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. Leslie Marmon Silko is a Native American writer born in 1948 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She received a BA from the University of New Mexico and published several short stories and poems in the late 1960s and 1970s.