Below is the text of the speech that opened this year's awards ceremony.
Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Lionel Foster. I’m a City College graduate from the class of 1998 and the founder of the Baldwin Prize.
Two years ago, someone decided to induct me into City College’s Hall of Fame. I didn’t think I’d earned that, but it wasn’t my choice. To give back and to make myself feel a little better about the tremendous honor, I decided to start a developmental and growth exercise disguised as a writing competition.
Writing is hard. To do it well, you have to look squarely at yourself and take in the good and the bad. It forces you to be honest. That honesty can lead to humility and humility to kindness. You look within, and, hopefully, that insight affects the way you navigate the world and treat other people.
I cannot name another writer who exemplified this traveling back and forth between the inner and outer worlds more than James Baldwin. This was a gay, black man in a country that tried to convince him he was worthless, who had the audacity to believe that what was true for him and about him had some bearing on how we all should conduct ourselves—how we should love, what we should fight over, and the unfinished country we might build together.
He did all that with words, and I wanted to encourage high-schoolers at a pivotal moment of their development to do the same.
We had 109 entries this year. We asked the essayists to write about a moment when they felt empowered. Some of you told me face to face when I spoke with your classes back in January that you’d never felt empowered. You knew what the word meant, but you thought it didn’t apply to you. That floored me, because it’s tragic, if you really believe you have no power. But what’s wonderful is having the opportunity, the support, and the occasion to put pen to paper and interrogate key moments in your life and see that you needed some amount of power just to survive this long. It was there. You just didn’t know it.
Some of you wrote about the rush of performing in front of an audience, others about getting some glimpse of what you were meant to do with your life. And some of you wrote about tragedy—the death of a parent, the slow death of a loved one due to substance abuse, cancer, violence, depression, despair.
You have seen so much. I consider it a breach of a social contract, of an unwritten agreement between generations like mine and yours that we have not protected you from so much of this.
It pains me that I cannot bring a father back from prison or make it so that there’s no need for you to protest racism, misogyny, or ignorance. But we are creating a community where you can confront all of those things through the written word with patience, intelligence, and heart. So keep writing, and please know that you are loved.
As far as I’m concerned, everything I and the many people who support this effort do is done to make it blindingly obvious that you are loved. Every word leads to that fact.
So today we will hear briefly from all the students, announce the winners, eat, and celebrate.
Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Lionel Foster. I’m a City College graduate from the class of 1998 and the founder of the Baldwin Prize.
Two years ago, someone decided to induct me into City College’s Hall of Fame. I didn’t think I’d earned that, but it wasn’t my choice. To give back and to make myself feel a little better about the tremendous honor, I decided to start a developmental and growth exercise disguised as a writing competition.
Writing is hard. To do it well, you have to look squarely at yourself and take in the good and the bad. It forces you to be honest. That honesty can lead to humility and humility to kindness. You look within, and, hopefully, that insight affects the way you navigate the world and treat other people.
I cannot name another writer who exemplified this traveling back and forth between the inner and outer worlds more than James Baldwin. This was a gay, black man in a country that tried to convince him he was worthless, who had the audacity to believe that what was true for him and about him had some bearing on how we all should conduct ourselves—how we should love, what we should fight over, and the unfinished country we might build together.
He did all that with words, and I wanted to encourage high-schoolers at a pivotal moment of their development to do the same.
We had 109 entries this year. We asked the essayists to write about a moment when they felt empowered. Some of you told me face to face when I spoke with your classes back in January that you’d never felt empowered. You knew what the word meant, but you thought it didn’t apply to you. That floored me, because it’s tragic, if you really believe you have no power. But what’s wonderful is having the opportunity, the support, and the occasion to put pen to paper and interrogate key moments in your life and see that you needed some amount of power just to survive this long. It was there. You just didn’t know it.
Some of you wrote about the rush of performing in front of an audience, others about getting some glimpse of what you were meant to do with your life. And some of you wrote about tragedy—the death of a parent, the slow death of a loved one due to substance abuse, cancer, violence, depression, despair.
You have seen so much. I consider it a breach of a social contract, of an unwritten agreement between generations like mine and yours that we have not protected you from so much of this.
It pains me that I cannot bring a father back from prison or make it so that there’s no need for you to protest racism, misogyny, or ignorance. But we are creating a community where you can confront all of those things through the written word with patience, intelligence, and heart. So keep writing, and please know that you are loved.
As far as I’m concerned, everything I and the many people who support this effort do is done to make it blindingly obvious that you are loved. Every word leads to that fact.
So today we will hear briefly from all the students, announce the winners, eat, and celebrate.
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