Kaya Thomas’s Journey to We Read Too
Earlier this week, my daughter Kaya celebrated her 25th birthday. Brilliant, warm-hearted, beautiful, and wise beyond her years, Kaya has taught me much about leadership.
In high school she co-founded a Science Camp for girls. In college, as you’ll read below, she filled a need through ingenuity and perseverance. I love the way she takes initiative, follows her passions, studies deeply, and pays close attention to detail. She develops her own skill sets, launches projects, and has the cultural and social skills to get help and support. Her husband Theo, also a graduate of Dartmouth College, is brilliant too.
As a father in a world of strife, confusion, and a worldwide pandemic, I’m overjoyed for Kaya’s success. She’s a busy young professional, so I appreciate her agreeing to share a guest column for our readers today.
A Voracious Reader
As I picked out books from the library, I paid more attention to how the characters were described. Yes, books were a means of escapism, but why did I constantly have to imagine myself as a white teen girl with blonde or brown hair and blue eyes?
I’ve always loved books. No matter how old I was or what I was going through, books were always a means of escape. I could learn, love, laugh, and grow all from a book. I also loved tinkering. I constantly asked questions about everything. I always desired to learn more and expand my mind. Books and tinkering were my first steps into a world of creativity, knowledge, and exploration.
When I was in elementary school, my parents would go to boutique bookstores throughout Harlem and Brooklyn to find picture books with Black girl characters, so I saw myself in the books I read. As I got older and became responsible for choosing my own books, my relationship with books began to change. As I selected books from the library, I paid closer attention to how the characters were described. Yes, books were a means of escapism, but why did I constantly have to imagine myself as a white teen girl with blonde or brown hair and blue eyes? I searched long and hard, scouring the library shelves for young adult [YA] books that had a main character with brown skin, brown eyes, and curly hair. They were few and far between. Was the literary world trying to tell me that girls like me weren’t important enough to write about?
Instead of only searching in my local library, I began to look online, and found that there were YA books with multifaceted characters of color available! But I didn’t understand why these books weren’t easily accessible in the libraries, bookstores, or the homepages of major bookseller websites. I felt empowered by the discovery but at a loss to how I could get such works to all the other kids of color who probably felt the same way I had. So I tucked the idea in the back of my mind and knew I had to return to it someday.
From Idea to Inspiration to Actualization
After I started college, my idea regarding a resource of books for children of color came to the forefront. During the winter break of my freshman year, I started searching again and I put all the books I found into a Word document. I ended up with a listing of over 300 books. But then I thought, now what? I was watching TED talks and came across one given by Kimberly Bryant, the founder of Black Girls Code. She said it was important for Black girls not only to be consumers of technology but to be able to create the technology themselves.
This set a lightbulb off in my head. I’ve always loved tinkering and technology, so I decided to learn how to code. I spent the rest of my break coding and loved it. I signed up for an introductory Computer Science course for the following winter term and from then on knew I wanted to be a Computer Science major. I knew these new skills could help me create a tool to help other young people of color find books in which they are represented.
During the summer after my first year of college, I decided to create an iPhone app to showcase all the great books I found written by authors of color, featuring characters of color. I was learning iOS development for my summer internship at Time Inc, so, after work, I would go home and work on my app idea.
First Lady Michelle Obama with Kaya and other Black Girls Rock! honorees in 2015
I named the app We Read Too to signify that representation for children and teens of color in literature is important. After launching the application in the App Store, people from all over the country, and eventually the world, started download it. Parents, educators, and students reviewed the app and shared with me how important and helpful it was. I knew that if my app even helped one person feel represented, and showed them that their stories are important enough to be told too, that I had done the right thing.
It’s been six years since I launched the first version of We Read Too. There have been over 100,000 downloads. Several years ago I successfully crowdfunded to get the Android version of the app made, which launched in October 2017. In February 2018, We Read Too got its first feature in the App Store, and this year the directory contains nearly 1,000 books. We Read Too will continue to grow as a free resource for folks to find children and YA books written by authors of color, featuring characters of color.
Kaya Thomas is an iOS engineer at Calm. Formerly she worked at Slack on the Messaging team. Kaya graduated from Dartmouth College with a degree in Computer Science. In 2014, she launched We Read Too, a book resource app that features titles written by authors of color. In 2016, she was honored in Glamour magazine as one of the Top Ten College Women of the Year. In February 2018, Kaya was featured in the App Store about We Read Too, and the story of what inspired her to create it. Aside from coding, she also enjoys writing and public speaking. Kaya has bylines in OneZero, Increment Magazine, Smashing Magazine, TechCrunch, Fusion and a published chapter in O’Reilly Media’s 97 Things Every Engineering Manager Should Know. She’s spoken at several conferences globally, including dotSwift, UIKonf, AppDevCon, Laracon, Codeland, 360iDev, try! Swift, AltConf, and more.
A Young Millennial Leader. Her dad couldn’t be prouder!