"The things I'm passionate about today are the things I've always been passionate about," Canadian writer Deborah Ellis told Debra Huron in an interview for Herizons. "One of the things that drives me is to continue to find arguments that the things that we do to change the world actually do change the world. Sometimes the only evidence we have is the knowledge that if we don't do it, then nothing changes. So everything we do is an act of faith." Such political activism has inspired Ellis's award-winning writings for adults as well as young adults. In Looking for X, an eleven-year-old girl struggles to makes sense out of her life on the mean streets of Toronto with her mother, who is a former stripper, and twin autistic brothers at home. In the adult title Women of the Afghan War, Ellis documents the tragedies of war through a...