Kaya Thomas facts for kids

Kaya Thomas-Wilson (born in 1995) is an American app developer. She created an app called We Read Too. This app helps young readers find books by and about people of color. Kaya also volunteers as a mentor for Black Girls Code. She is a role model for the Made with Code program. She has been recognized for helping make the tech world more diverse. In 2015, Michelle Obama honored her at the Black Girls Rock! awards. Glamour magazine also named her one of their College Women of the Year in 2016.

Early Life and Learning

Kaya Thomas grew up in Staten Island, New York. When she was in high school, she loved to read. But she noticed that many young adult books did not feature black girls. She wished there was an easy way to find books written by and for black girls and women. This idea later inspired her to create the We Read Too app.

Kaya graduated from Dartmouth College in 2017. She studied computer science there. At first, she planned to study environmental engineering. But she taught herself to code using Codecademy. This made her switch to computer science. She was also inspired by a TED Talk from Kimberly Bryant. Kimberly Bryant is the founder of Black Girls Code. Kaya is very interested in how technology can make people's daily lives better.

Kaya's Career Journey

One of Kaya's first jobs was an internship at Time Inc.. She worked on the mobile website for Entertainment Weekly.

After finishing college in 2017, Kaya worked as an iOS engineer for Slack. An iOS engineer builds apps for Apple devices like iPhones. Currently, she works for Calm. Calm is a company that focuses on wellness and meditation. It is located in San Francisco, California.

In 2015, Kaya was chosen as a CODE2040 Fellow. The next year, Google picked her as a role model for their Made with Code program. This program helps girls learn to code. It encourages them to join technology fields. She was also named one of Glamour's College Women of the Year in 2016.

About the We Read Too App

Kaya started creating the We Read Too app in 2014. She was an intern at Time Inc. at the time. The app features books written by people of color. These books also have characters of color. The goal of We Read Too is to make it easier to find diverse books. It helps young readers find stories with characters they can relate to. The app is free to download. This helps make sure everyone can use it. People helped by donating money to make this possible.

The idea for the app came from Kaya's own experiences. She found it hard to find diverse books when she was young. She told BET in 2014 that she had to search for a long time. She wanted to create a place where books by and for people of color could be found easily. Michelle Obama honored Kaya for her work on the app in 2015. This happened at the Black Girls Rock! awards show.

By April 2017, the app had been downloaded 15,000 times. By March 2020, it listed almost 1,000 book titles. To reach this goal, Kaya started a fundraising campaign in March 2017. She wanted to list 1,000 titles featuring Black, Latinx, Native, Indigenous, Asian, and Pacific Islander characters. She also planned to create an Android version of the app. And she wanted to update the iOS version. By mid-April, she had raised more than her goal of $10,000. She said extra money would go towards making a website for the app. It would also help add fiction books for adults.

Other Projects and Contributions

In 2015, Kaya spoke at BookNet Canada's Tech Forum. She talked about how important it is for children to see diverse characters in books. She encouraged the publishing industry to include information about authors' backgrounds. This would help people find diverse writers and books more easily.

Kaya has also written for news sites like TechCrunch. She has appeared on podcasts such as Another Round and Code Newbie. On these shows, she discusses her work.

Kaya is a volunteer mentor for Black Girls Code. She also started a YouTube series called Code With Kaya. She is dedicated to helping women learn to code. She also wants to make the tech and publishing industries more diverse.

She has four patents. These patents are about how software on devices can be fixed automatically using push notifications.

Awards and Honors

• 2015 - Black Girls Rock! Honoree, BET
• 2016 - College Women of the Year, Glamour