Oct. 6, 2023—It was in the fifth grade at Wilder Elementary School that Tonya (Duncan) Ellis first discovered she had a talent for writing. With encouragement from her teacher, Ms. Banks, Ellis entered a young authors writing contest and won first prize.
“She really inspired me with writing,” Ellis said.
And Ms. Banks wasn’t the last Jefferson County Public Schools teacher who pushed and inspired her.
“All of my English and humanities teachers at Western High School instilled a love of reading and writing in me,” Ellis said. “I was in all kinds of writing competitions. Those experiences definitely shaped me.”
And look at her now! Ellis is an award-winning author of children’s books. Her Sophie Washington series featuring a young African-American girl growing up in suburban Houston has sold more than 150,000 copies.
Her career as an author took flight after careers in journalism and business when Ellis decided to use her writing talent to, hopefully, inspire young readers including her son. Ellis says the youngest of her three children didn’t like to read because he couldn’t relate to the characters in the classic books she shared with him—slaves, people living in poverty or suffering from trauma.
“So, I decided I might be able to write a children’s series that might be interesting for my kids and kind of a fun thing to do,” Ellis said.
The Sophie Washington series includes 13 books. The stories feature Sophie and her diverse group of friends playing, managing schoolwork and other day-to-day things that kids encounter.
“They teach children valuable lessons and about being true to themselves—standing up to bullies, being a good friend, being honest and persevering,” Ellis said. “They teach healthy values, and they are books that kids want to pick up and read.”
She has a 14th book coming out in 2024. HarperCollins will publish Ellis' first picture book, THEY BUILT ME FOR FREEDOM: The Story of Juneteenth and Houston's Emancipation Park.
Ellis, who volunteered at the Louisville Public Library, played on the tennis team and was voted “most likely to succeed” by her fellow Western High graduates in 1988, said the best advice she can give today’s students is “write and read a lot” because doing so “opened up the world to me when I was growing up in Louisville.”
“My teachers really encouraged us to reach for the stars and look beyond what we had growing up to see bigger things,” she said. “So, I want to thank them for all that encouragement, hard work and dedication.”
By Mark Hebert