On June 12, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions converged on the Celeste Bartos Forum of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building to commemorate 25 years of the group's fiction award. The Young Lions Fiction Award is a $10,000 prize which celebrates an American writer under the age of 35 for a novel or short story. Originally founded in 2001 by Ethan Hawke, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, Rick Moody, and Hannah McFarland, the award has been given to such writers such as Anthony Doerr, Catherine Lacey, and Colson Whitehead.
Emily Graff, executive editor at Simon and Schuster, introduced the evening by thanking the Young Lions leadership and sponsors as well as the more than 700 members of the NYPL's Young Lions—a membership group for library supporters in their 20s and 30s—for their “continued generosity and dedication to our library.”
Graff then announced that the emcee for the evening, much to the surprise of the audience, was Gossip Girl and You actor Penn Badgley. Badgley took to the stage to introduce a brief video featuring award founder Ethan Hawke and several previous winners of the award such as Andrew Sean Greer, Olga Grushin, Monique Truong, who cited how the award impacted their career.
Badgley then welcomed a slate of actors and writers who would be giving readings from the finalist’s works. Tyler Foggatt, senior editor at the New Yorker, read from 'Pemi Aguda’s Ghostroots (W. W. Norton & Company); deaf actress Millicent Simmonds signed a passage from Eliza Barry Callahan's The Hearing Test (Catapault); actor Ebon Moss-Bachrach read from Alexander Sammartino’s Last Acts (Scribner); Them editor-in-chief Fran Tirado read from Santiago Jose Sanchez’s Hombrecito (Riverhead); and actress Alexa Barajas read from Karla Cornejo Villavicencio's Catalina (One World Books).
The evening closed with the announcement of the winner of Young Lions Fiction Award: Sammartino's Last Acts. Sammartino briefly returned to the stage to congratulate his fellow finalists and thank his editor Rebekah Jett and agent Michael Mungiello. In his acceptance speech, Sammartino laughed at the serendipity of receiving an award at the library, remembering the first time he’d been there he’d been writing “really bad paper about Huck Finn. But I’m a much better writer now.”
