The Creative Communications competition is a prestigious poetry application in which numerous global candidates participate annually. Students gain the benefits of publication of their piece, earn highly significant prizes, and contribute to an increase in the donations to teachers for school supplies. This program has played essential roles within the active careers of various successful individuals, such as Taylor Swift, who won Top Ten in the contest. As a result, only the top 40% of the admits will receive the impressive opportunity for their poems to gain publication; however, less than one percent of the thousand participants are selected to be one of the Top ten winners for each grade “division.” Within that one percent of the selected applicants was none other than one of our highly intellectual students: the one and only Soeun Lee.
This all started with Lee’s significant passion for the art of writing, specifically poetry. Her relationship with writing as an extracurricular goes way back to when she was in elementary school and wrote her very first short story in the first grade, encouraged by her English teacher. In the beginning, she was strongly not fond of the writing experience, as she explained, “I didn’t like the fact that I was writing something when I could read it instead.” However, as she continued to write, she developed a strong passion for “prose fiction.” She expressed how writing would lead to her constructing new things everyday. By then, Lee realized that “the quality that [she] once hated about writing soon became the reason [she] loved writing.” Recently, during the summer before 8th grade, she made the transition to poetry, yearning to keep experimenting with new styles of writing. In the beginning of this transition, she feared that she did not know “how” to write poetry, but throughout her journey of poetry, she has learned that there is no definitive method in writing poetry.
Lee’s talent in writing is clearly demonstrated not only by the sophistication of her pieces but also by her active participation and awards from various writing programs. In the previous year, she was an “ambassador” for a writing program, she was awarded two Honorable Mentions and 2 Scholastic Gold Keys, she was chosen for the National Top 10 of the Digital Writer’s Showcase, and she was selected by National Poet Laureate Ada Limon to publish her writing in a National Poetry Anthology. Lee has also been published in five poetry anthologies and has won a Teen Ink Review Competition. She also became a finalist for various Write the World competitions. Meanwhile, this year, Lee has won the Notable Award in the Bow Seat Ocean Awareness Contest in November, and in January, she won an 826 National Poetry Competition. Finally, last month she was elected as a finalist for the Teen Ink Ballad Competition.
In addition to Lee’s trophy case of awards from these writing competitions, not only was her poem, “My Mom’s Hair,” selected for publication from the competitive Creative Communications Poetry Competition, but she was also nominated as one of the Top Ten winners of her grade division. In the past, Lee has participated in this competition three times but was only selected for publication, not as one of the Top Ten winners, until now. As she applied to this competition, she was aspiring to “share” her writing “…with the world and hope that someone else would find inspiration from it to create a piece of their own too.” Lee’s ambition for her writing to become something is displayed by her poems’ purity and naturalness as she demonstrates her own character within her words.
When expressing her artistic ideas within her poems, she is often inspired by the people and things she sees in her daily life. In her thought process, she grasps these ordinary factors that she would witness in any day and connects them to relevant concepts. In this case, her poem, “My Mom’s Hair,” was not her most sophisticated or “favorite” poem to write, but it was inspired by her “favorite person in the world,” her mother. Within the poem, Lee expresses her profound love for her mother, as she comments, “she makes up my entire world, painting my skies every day.”
Lee has come an extremely long way since she established her relationship with the art of writing, and it is completely clear that her passion and talent for it will only continue to grow in the future. Even when she was not fond of the art in the beginning, it was her perseverance and creativity that helped her to navigate her journey, forming her into the extraordinary writer she is today. For all of the dreamers out there who yearn to become a writer, here is an inspiration that Lee has grasped: “Experimenting isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Some pieces may turn out to be far from perfect…but they still reflect what kind of person you were in the moment and what you were thinking…. Poetry reflects on who you were at the moment and what mattered to you most during that time.”
