Laurie Anderson is a writer, director, composer, visual artist, musician, and vocalist. Her live shows include United States, Empty Places, Songs and Stories from Moby Dick, and Delusion. In 2002, Anderson was appointed the first artist-in-residence of NASA, which culminated in her 2004 touring solo performance The End of the Moon. She has directed multiple films, such as Home of the Brave, Carmen, Hidden Inside Mountains, and Heart of a Dog. As a performer and musician, she has collaborated with Brian Eno, Jean-Michel Jarre, William S. Burroughs, Peter Gabriel, Robert Wilson, Christian McBride, and Philip Glass. As a composer, she has contributed music to films by Wim Wenders and Jonathan Demme, dance pieces by Bill T. Jones, Trisha Brown, Molissa Fenley, and scores for theater productions including plays by Robert LePage. Anderson has published ten books and been nominated for five Grammys throughout her recording career with Warner Records and Nonesuch. Her visual work has been featured in many galleries and museums around the world including France, Brazil, and Sweden. She is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, and the Wolf Prize. In 2024, Anderson received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Recording Academy at the 66th Grammy Awards, the Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication at the Starmus VII Festival, and the Gold Medal for Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has worked on numerous projects in AI with the Machine Learning Institute in Adelaide, Australia, where she was artist in residence in 2020. Anderson recently debuted her latest show, ARK: United States Part V, commissioned by the Manchester International Festival. Her life partner as well as her collaborator was Lou Reed from 1992 onward. They married in 2008 and worked on numerous projects together until his death in 2013.

Lori Carlson-Hijuelos is an editor, translator, and writer whose career began at the Americas Society in New York City. There, in 1981, she met her future husband, Oscar Hijuelos, the first Latino to win a Pulitzer Prize in fiction. She began writing full time in 1990, publishing her first book for children, Where Angels Glide at Dawn, with Harper & Row. She is the anthologist of many books, most notable among them Cool Salsa, which is now considered a classic by the American Library Association, and Red Hot Salsa. She is also the author of three novels, including The Sunday Tertulia. Her memoir, A Writing Marriage, celebrates her late husband’s remarkable novels, and their beautiful life together, which was bound by true love, faith, and literature. It was published today.

Oscar Hijuelos was one of America’s finest novelists of the late 20th century. He was the first American of Latino ethnicity, specifically Cuban-American, to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his beloved novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. Among his other works is his acclaimed Mr. Ives’ Christmas, which reveals his Christian faith in the tradition of Catholicism.