What’s in a name? Well, if you are 12-year-old Elin Joy Seiler, it is happiness.
Elin’s mother Erika said, “The name Elin means bright light, and her middle name is Joy. I think it was God-inspired. Elin has such a spirit of joy around her. It is contagious.”
The seventh-grader from Wheaton, Ill., who loves to read and write, won the American Immigration Council’s 2022 Celebrate America Creative Writing Contest with her poem, “Where I’m From.”
Since then, she has been honored at an American Immigration Council gala in New York and was featured on “Good Morning America.” Elin read her work onstage to an enthralled audience at commissioning weekend in June.
“I love this poem. I hope to inspire people to feel and express empathy and to know God’s love,” she said.
The poem looks at the lives of four immigrant girls from Ireland, Afghanistan, Indonesia and Ukraine.
“We had been reading stories about immigration and refugees at school. And refugees had been fleeing Afghanistan and Ukraine,” Elin recalled. “I wanted to write this to inspire empathy in people for those who are different than them.”
Elin describes each girl’s homeland. For the young girl from Ukraine, she writes, “I am from what used to be beautiful. From my ripped quilt in faded blue and yellow.”
“I wanted to show that we all want love. We all want to be loved, even though we may look different or have different cultures or religions,” Elin said. “God loves all of us. There isn’t a face that God does not love.”
She worked on the poem for about two weeks, researching different languages and countries and writing parts of it each day in her English Language Arts class.
“I was really excited to share it,” she recalled.
After submitting the poem, it took a couple of months to hear from the American Immigration Council.
“When I won, my mom was just looking at her cell phone, saying, ‘Oh my gosh! Oh my gosh!” Elin said. “We were all so excited.”
Elin and her family, including Erika, father Bryan and 9-year-old brother Evan, attend the Oakbrook Terrace, Ill., Corps. Elin is a junior soldier and girl guard, plays percussion in the junior band, is a member of the singing company and participates in teen time.
“I’m so grateful to have our church family,” she said.
Many of her grandparents and great-grandparents served as Salvation Army officers, including Central Territory officers, Majors Randall and Deborah Sjögren and Majors Dwight and Neoma Garrington, and Southern Territory officers Lt. Colonels James and Karol Seiler and Lt. Colonels David and Jean Mikles.
Along with her love of reading and writing, Elin takes ballet, jazz and lyrical dance lessons and is a professional actress, performing on stages in Chicago and New York
“I’d love to be both an actress and an author,” she said. “I love writing, and acting is kind of my life. That is what I want my life to look like.”
In her downtime, Elin enjoys spending time with Evan, reading and sharing stories. Evan in turn shares his comic creations with his sister.
“I love him so much,” Elin said. “He is a really good artist. We have a book club. He illustrates, and I write.”
Some of Elin’s favorite titles include the Harry Potter series, Jasmine Warga books and A Wrinkle in Time. She also enjoys Amanda Gorman poems and the Psalms.
“She keeps her focus on God,” Erika said.
