Clarendon Hills teen’s poem published ‘Chicken Soup’ series

Allison Sulouff was in middle school when her mother was diagnosed with cancer.

The Clarendon Hills resident couldn’t find a comfortable way to handle that news, so she started writing poetry.

“I’m not good about talking about my feelings,” said Sulouff, who graduated last spring from Hinsdale Central and now is a freshman at Illinois State University. “Writing was a way for me to express how I felt; it helped me to get some of my feelings out.”

Sulouff continued to write, and she wrote a very personal poem during her junior year at Hinsdale Central after her mom died. The poem, “4:08,” was a personal, therapeutic way for Sulouff to deal with her grief. But the poem later took on a life of its own.

A teen angst poetry website, which no longer is active, became the first home for “4:08” after it had been written, but it didn’t stop there.

“They had links on the side of the website, and I decided to click on one,” Sulouff said. “I posted it online there, and they contacted me last October or November to ask me if I wanted to be in their book.”

The book, Chicken Soup for the Soul: Tough Times for Teens, was published Feb. 7; Sulouff’s poem is on pages 44-45.

The “Chicken Soup for the Soul” series of books was started in 1993 and has sold more than 112 million copies of more than 200 titles, according to information from the publisher.

The book series was the idea of motivational speakers Mark Victor Hansen and Jack Canfield, who built their speaking careers by telling inspirational, motivational and uplifting stories. Getting many audience requests to put their stories into book form resulted in a decision by Hansen and Canfield to reach out to others and seek contributions of powerful tales of ordinary people doing extraordinary things. The first book in the series included those stories.

“I never expected anything like that to happen,” Sulouff said of her inclusion in the book. “When I was younger, my mom got me one of the books, and I had read another. It’s cool that the book my poem is in is something I’m familiar with. It makes it mean more than if it was something I didn’t know anything about.”

Initially, Sulouff wasn’t certain that she wanted something as personal as “4:08” made so public by its inclusion in a book that is part of a best-selling series.

“I was hesitant about that at first,” she said. “I knew the poem meant a lot to my grandma and my dad, but it was a little strange to think about it being in a book.

“My dad said it might help someone else who reads it; that’s what really made me decide to have it included. It would be wonderful if it did help someone else. It would have been nice if there had been something like that for me.”

Sulouff said she still writes poetry, but not as often as she did in middle and high school.

“I still like to do it, but I’m pretty busy now with work for school,” she said.


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