Don DeLillo is the author of seventeen novels including Underworld, Zero K, Libra, and White Noise, and the story collection The Angel Esmeralda, a finalist for the Story Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He has also written plays and essays. He has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the PEN/Saul Bellow Award, the Jerusalem Prize for his complete body of work, the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and, in 2025, the Academy's Gold Medal for Fiction. DeLillo has been awarded the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction and the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
Laura “Laurie” Anderson is an American avant-garde artist, composer, musician, and film director whose work spans performance art, pop music, and multimedia projects. She is a graduate of Barnard College and Columbia University, where she obtained an MFA in sculpture. Anderson started dating Reed in 1992, and was married to him from 2008 until his death in 2013.