There weren't too many books featuring other cultures and countries when I was growing up as an immigrant kid here in the States.

Research is always a high priority in my fiction. Songs, fashion, politics, television, movies, trends - I try to get those details right.

I hope and pray that despite an unhealed past full of atrocities and deep divisions in the present, God can and will make "the distant near" and a "brother of the stranger" in America's future.

I learned to read when I was three, so I skipped right over picture books and didn't learn to appreciate art in books until much later.

If you have a chance to see Children Of War, you can watch expert trauma counselors try to help bring healing to young people who have experienced atrocities in conflict.

We adults all stay sixteen or so in some corner of the soul.

There weren't too many books featuring other cultures and countries when I was growing up as an immigrant kid here in the States.