Arts and Letters

NEW YORK, MARCH 27, 2025 – The American Academy of Arts and Letters announces the recipients of its highest honors for excellence in the arts: two Gold Medals, this year for Fiction and Sculpture; the Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts; and the William Dean Howells Medal for the best work of American fiction published in the last five years. The recipients of these awards were chosen by the 300 members of Arts and Letters.

Given each year in rotating categories of the arts, our Gold Medals are awarded to those who have achieved eminence in an entire body of work. Writer Don DeLillo will receive the Gold Medal for Fiction, and artist Alice Aycock will receive the Gold Medal for Sculpture.

Don DeLillo’s prolific body of work spans decades in a sustained engagement with a denatured postmodern reality. Included among his many awards are the National Book Award for his seminal work White Noise in 1985 and the William Dean Howells Medal for his novel Underworld in 2000. He is stylistically the most influential writer of his generation.

Alice Aycock’s work examines the overlap between architecture and sculpture through themes such as cybernetics, phenomenology, physics, post-structuralism, information overload, scientific discoveries, and computer programming. Aycock’s early site-specific work in the land art movement of the 1970s addressed issues of human interaction with the built environment. Her fantastical structures often heighten the inherent psychological qualities of architectural space and function as sites where memories can be buried and unearthed.

The Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts is presented annually to someone who has rendered notable service to the arts in this country. Wendy Lesser is the founder and editor of The Threepenny Review, which she launched out of her apartment in 1980 while pursuing her PhD at UC Berkeley. The magazine offered the chance to explore styles of writing that were underrepresented in the literary press at the time, and it remains a vital and invaluable space for writers to experiment with and explore interests that might not otherwise reach the reading public. Under Lesser’s leadership and championing, The Threepenny Review has attained a spirit all its own: generous, personal, questioning, and supremely intelligent.

The Howells Medal was named after founding member William Dean Howells and is given once every five years in recognition of the most distinguished work of American fiction published during that period. This year, the medal will go to Louise Erdrich for The Night Watchman, which was published in 2020 and received the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 2021. Set in 1953 and based on events from the life of Erdrich’s grandfather, The Night Watchman recounts how Thomas Wazhashk, a night guard at a jewel-bearing plant in North Dakota, fights against the US government as it attempts to ignore previous treaties and strip Native Americans of their land. The novel illuminates the tragedy and courage at the heart of this Native American story. Erdrich has published over 20 works of fiction, short stories, nonfiction, and poetry, and owns the small independent bookstore Birchbark Books in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

These honors will be presented alongside awards in architecture, art, literature, and music at Arts and Letters’s annual Ceremonial in May.

American Academy of Arts and Letters

The American Academy of Arts and Letters is an honor society of artists, architects, composers, and writers who foster and sustain interest in the arts. Its 300 members distribute over 70 awards annually; fund concerts and new works of musical theater; purchase and commission contemporary art for donation to museums across the country; and present exhibitions, talks, and events for the public at our historic buildings in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City.

Media Inquiries

Ashley Fedor
(212) 368-5900
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