In this excerpt, Faust talks to Kadohata about how her experience as a Japanese-American growing up in the South influenced her writing and her Newbery Award-winning novel, Kira-Kira.

It was four in the morning on the West Coast, and Cynthia Kadohata's phone was ringing. This had better not be bad news or a crank caller. Kadohata's boyfriend grabbed the receiver, listened to the excited librarian on the line from Boston, and passed the phone to her. The next moment, Kadohata was leaping up and down: her first children's book, Kira-Kira (S & S, 2004), had just won the Newbery Medal, the nation's most prestigious award for young people's literature.

Since Kadohata began writing fiction in 1981, her career has had more ups and downs than the Grand Tetons. Her short stories appeared in The New Yorker. The New York Times praised the "beautiful, clean yet lyrical prose" of her first...