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.

Good humor pokes fun at the powerful — not the weak.

It’s a lovely adaptation that honors Lois Lowry’s vision and authority…the film…illuminates and explores the beauty, danger and pain of our free, creative lives. Plenty to talk about in families and other communities. Go see it.

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.

Keep reading and writing, learn how to revise, and push through rejections. My second book, Monsoon Summer, was rejected over 20 times and finally came out 11 years after my first book! I'm glad I didn't give up. Neither should you.

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