22-Year-Old Brookline Native Honored With City Proclamation
June 23 was officially named “Ryan Lestitian Day” after a Duquesne student who published his debut novel.
PHOTO VIA DUQUESNE UNIVERSITY’S FACEBOOK PAGE
Ryan Lestitian, a 22-year-old Brookline native, will resume his studies in political science at Duquesne University in the fall. While most of his peers spent their summer doing internships, traveling, working or relaxing, Lestitian got his very own city-wide day.
“Getting a day named after me sounds like something I’d make up and put on my Instagram on April Fool’s Day,” Lestitian says in a press release. “I never imagined something like this could actually happen, so I feel extremely grateful.”
On June 23 in the council chambers on the fifth floor of the City-County Building, the proclamation for “Ryan Lestitian Day” was presented. The city-wide day was in celebration of Lestitian publishing his debut novel, “Cell 900.” It’s a psychological horror novel that follows a former police officer who, after a tragic accident, takes a prison-guard job in rural Utah.
The novel is based on a real life experience that his uncle, a police officer, encountered while on the job. His uncle faced a tense encounter and almost fired his weapon while mistaking a metal object in someone’s hand as a gun. Nobody was injured, but the story still stuck with Lestitian.
“I just thought it was interesting how one moment could change your whole life and the lives of everyone around you,” he says.
When he was just 16-years-old and a junior at Seton-LaSalle High School in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, he sat down to write. For six years, he wrote, even taking a gap year from college to finish the novel. In January 2026, he could finally relax; his novel was published by Word Association Publishers.
The idea for a city-wide day came while he was writing his book. He struck up a conversation with his local councilman, Anthony Coghill, and after finding out that Lestitian was writing a book, the councilman proposed giving him a city council declaration.
“I did give him the first hardcover copy as he wanted, but it was mainly all him taking an interest in the community,” Lestitian says.
Lestitian, while continuing his studies, is 70,000 words into his newest novel, “Swing You Sinners,” a horror story set in 1933 Prohibition-era Chicago. It follows an Army veteran who joins a group of bootleggers hired by the mayor to investigate a citywide conspiracy tied to a mysterious “third party.”
“The funny thing is I don’t feel so young anymore, because it took me so long to write it,” he says. “I definitely don’t take being young and doing this for granted. I understand that it is pretty rare in the field, but I feel like I aged 20 years in the past six years.”
