Midland Daily News article

This article on SELLOUT appeared in the Midland Daily News this morning:

By the Midland Daily News
By Lori Qualls
lqualls@mdn.net

Ebony Wilkins knows all about not fitting in while in high school. And she's OK with it.

Wilkins grew up in Midland, and went to school at Adams Elementary and Northeast Middle School. But it was when her family moved to Indianapolis and she attended high school there, that she found herself on the receiving end of hurtful names.

"Lawrence Central was a racially mixed school," Wilkins said. "I think that it's always easier for others to shy away from things they don't understand. I spoke differently and I was the new girl and unfortunately, teens will be teens. They called me names and weren't as welcoming as I would have liked."

It was these experiences that inspired her book "Sellout," which will be released July 1 by Scholastic Press. The book tells the story of NaTasha, the only African American in her suburban school. That doesn't bother NaTasha, the book jacket states, but it troubles Tilly, her grandmother from Harlem. Her grandmother decides NaTasha needs to get back to her roots on her summer vacation instead of getting manicures and lattes at the mall. So, NaTasha volunteers at a Bronx crisis center for troubled girls and it is there that she begins to question why she's in a ballet troupe when she'd rather be playing volleyball or why she hasn't had a boyfriend in her all-white neighborhood back home.

"The main character in the story is torn between two worlds," Wilkins said. One, a small town, predominantly Caucasian, and the other, the big city with its mix of all types of people. "(NaTasha) is at an age where she tries to find herself and her place in two different worlds."

Wilkins, 33, said the book is based "very loosely" on her own story and that it is mostly fiction.

"The general idea is based on my personal experience (in Indianapolis)," she said. "I didn't fit in then, I don't fit in now. But that's OK. It's OK to be different."

That is the message she wants middle and high schoolers to get. The book is geared toward readers ages 12 and older.

Wilkins, who interned one summer at the Daily News while working on her bachelor's degree in communications from Purdue University, has taught school for the past nine years, three years at the high school level in Indiana, and six years in early childhood education in New York City. She earned a master's degree in creative writing from New School University in Manhattan, and it was there she met a Scholastic editor who also served as her instructor. She wrote "Sellout" as her thesis project, and her instructor loved the story and bought it for Scholastic.

She said she always has wanted to teach and write, but wasn't sure of how she would blend the two. Those two paths have intersected, and Wilkins plans to move from New York to Chicago, where she will pursue her PhD. in education at the University of Illinois, hoping to ultimately teach at the university level. She also just announced on Facebook her engagement to Jayson Canady, who lives in Chicago.

She's in the early stages of writing a story for preschoolers and also is keeping open a sequel to "Sellout."

Her parents, David and Lois Wilkins, live in Freeland.

For more information, ebonyjoywilkins.com