“You can’t control luck, but you can control your own perseverance,” author Ellen Oh told the students of the Middle School last week during an assembly in Thies Auditorium. She knew from personal experience: when she decided as an adult that she wanted to leave behind a career as a lawyer to become an author, it took her ten years to get published. When a student asked why it took so long, she grinned and said, “I really stunk at it.”

Although Oh referred to her early efforts as “terrible stinky no-good books that nobody should ever read,” she got much better: she now has 15 books in print, with eight more on the way. Her bibliography includes the Spirit Hunters series of thrillers, the immigrant roman a clef Finding Junie Kim, and The Dragon Egg Princess, a fantasy novel based on Korean folklore. She explained why she kept returning to middle-grade horror: “I started writing children’s books and I realized I can scare hundreds of other people’s children.”

Oh, sporting lavender hair and a T-shirt emblazoned with the message “FIGHT EVIL / READ BOOKS,” was a lively speaker who quickly engaged the assembled students. (Her visit, sponsored by the library in partnership with the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, was presented with assistance from Parents’ Council.)  She told them how the initial impetus for her book-writing was having children of her own and wanting to find books for them that reflected their Korean-American identity: the types of books she craved when she was growing up. When she couldn’t find them, she resolved to write her own.

That experience inspired Oh to be the cofounder of the activist group We Need Diverse Books, which has the mission statement “All children should find themselves in the pages of a book.” While she was pleased that publishing has diversified in recent years, she also alerted students that censorship was on the rise across the nation, cautioning them that “book banning has always been the beginning of terrible periods in history.”

Fielding questions from the Latin students, she shared some of her favorite books when she was younger (Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, Lois Duncan’s I Know What You Did Last Summer, Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club) and her writing habits (nocturnal: she’s most productive between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m.) Explaining her research process, she told students that for her 2024 book The Colliding Worlds of Mina Lee, she had to study physics, specifically quantum mechanics. She confided, “As a writer, I find myself researching things I never thought I’d be interested in.”