Jasmine Warga: Hi. I'm Jasmine Warga and I'm the author of Other Words for Home. And Other Words for Home is the story of 12-year-old Jude, who lives in Syria with her family, her mother, her father and her beloved older brother. But things in her home town are increasingly becoming more volatile because of the current political situation, and her mother decides that it would be safest for her and Jude to move across the Atlantic Ocean to the United States to live with her uncle, who's already in the United States. She's a big fan of movies, especially American movies, that's mostly what she knows about the United States, and she is reconciling this image she had of America with what it's really like, all the while trying to figure out what it means to feel like two places are home, and this idea that home might be more of a feeling than a place.

The idea for the book came to me when I was having dinner with some family friends. My father is Jordanian, and his best friend here in America is Syrian, and I was over at the friend's house, having dinner, and some of his family members had come over to stay with him because of the situation in Syria. And I watched as cousins who were born in America, interacted with cousins who were born in Syria, and I started thinking about what it means for families who live on either side of the Atlantic Ocean—like I have cousins who live in Jordan—and what that relationship is like. And then I tucked that idea away and it wasn't until Fall that I really started to work on this book in earnest. I think I was frustrated by the lack of empathy that was being shown to children who are being forced to flee from a dangerous war zone and I wanted to tell one of these children's stories and show that these are kids that have dreams and hopes and we don't need to be afraid of them.