On Wednesday, September 12, 2018 famous author Ellen Hopkins came to Evergreen Park Community High School. Almost every English block 4 class came to see Ellen.  She is a New York Times bestselling author because of her amazing writing. She relates to issues going on in the world such as bullying, sexual abuse, kidnapping, human trafficking, gun violence, drug abuse, and many more topics.  All of her books involve these topics, which can cause discomfort in most people. She is a passionate writer who takes real world experiences and puts them into epic stories. She also talks about objects that we don’t talk about, but we should.

Her real world experiences with her daughter inspired her first novel Crank.  The book made people fall in love with her writing. The novel, Crank, was about her adopted daughter’s meth addiction.   Two of the books that she sold at the high school were The You I’ve Never Known and her newest, People Kill People.  The novel People Kill People is about real life gun violence, which is one of the many controversial topics in today’s media.  The other book sold at the school was The You I’ve Never Known.  The novel is about kidnapping, a crucial topic that is happening more and more frequently.  Ellen took these topics and pushed past the limits most won’t cross. The most common thing we hear on the news is about gun violence because people are getting hurt or killed.  The second most common thing we see is people disappearing. These are hard topics to talk about, but it is happening.

The EPCHS summer read theme was “Immerse Yourself in Verse.”  Ellen’s books are written in verse, so she opened our first author meet and greet perfectly.  Many students and teachers had the chance to buy her featured books. Students and teachers also had the chance to ask Ellen questions about her life and her writing career.  Throughout her presentation Ellen said, “If I hadn’t started writing about my daughter’s addiction, I would still end up writing.” Evergreen Park High School was very honored to have her come and speak about her new books.  The line of students waiting to purchase Ellen’s books and interact with her as she finalized her presentation clearly showed the impact she had on the EPCHS community.