DE PERE –De Pere High School Freshman Katie Soquet was recently awarded the grand prize in the 12–14 age category of the 2025 Sister Cities International Young Artists and Authors Showcase essay division for her piece, “Creating Friendships Across Cultures.”
The annual art contest “encourages youth worldwide to express the mission of Sister Cities International through original artwork, literature, poetry, photography and music.”
This year’s theme was “Friendship: The Heartbeat of Global Peace,” and the local chapter reviewed over 340 submissions from students ages 12-14.
Katie’s winning piece was a realistic fiction essay that highlighted the theme of this year’s showcase.
“It’s a story about a girl who is neighbors with somebody who used to live in Sweden, and it shows a lot about culture, integration and about how she accepts the culture and that she’s really curious about it. And in the end, she kind of realizes that Sister Cities and friendships across countries and borders really doesn’t have to be a wall, it can be more of a fence with gates and bridges. The thing that I wanted to keep indefinitely was that message at the end… That’s my favorite part of the essay,” shared Katie.
“I think it took me, between writing/revising/editing, it took me a total of two months. It was in-and-out since it was during the school year… To start it was two-thousand words, but then right before submitting it I realized it had to be five-hundred words… I had to cut out a ton of details and then I went around to my family and said, ‘Tell me one thing you think I could cut out of this.”
“I was really happy that she took the opportunity to write the essay and engage and submit a piece of work for this Young Artist Showcase,” said Katie’s dad, Randy. “I knew she had a wealth of background knowledge. We were able to host someone from our Sister City for a couple of weeks, and our family went over and spent time there, so she’s had the cultural experience of hosting a teacher from Sweden and actually spending a couple weeks in Sweden last summer.”
Katie said that what she learned during the time she spent in Sweden is what helped her the most while writing her creative essay.
She also said that she went to her dad — a teacher at De Pere High School — many times for advice throughout the writing process.
“I thought this was a really neat opportunity, and she bounced some ideas off of me during the writing process, but I wanted it to be her work and not mine. Mostly, I just offered insights about how to add detail in writing and show connections to the reader,” said Randy.
Winning the essay came with many emotions, as well as a $1,000 prize, which Katie seemed more than shocked to receive.
“This is a funny story,” she shared while laughing. “We were down in Illinois helping move my brother and my dad and I got a call from our Sister Cities coordinator in De Pere, and she was like, ‘I don’t know if you saw the email yet, but you won.’ And we were just so happy. We didn’t even think to check for an email.”
The message of Katie’s essay is rooted in friendship, acceptance and open-mindedness, which are all core values of Sister Cities.
“Yes, we know people across counties. We know the presidents and the prime ministers and those people, but we don’t know who’s there in the small cities and villages that are making the background work happen and are helping bridge the connections,” she said.
Katie’s essay can be found at sistercities.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/KS_Creating_Friendships_Across_Cultures.pdf.
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