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 with Black Girls Code. She is a role model for Made with Code, which teaches girls about computer programming. She has been honored for her work to 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 2016 College Women of the Year.

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 have black girls as main characters. She wished there was a way to easily find books written by and for black girls and women. This idea later inspired her to create her app, We Read Too.

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

Kaya's Career

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

After finishing college in 2017, Kaya worked full-time as an iOS engineer for Slack. An iOS engineer builds apps for Apple devices like iPhones. Currently, she works for Calm. This company helps people with wellness and meditation. It is based in San Francisco, California.

In 2015, Kaya was chosen as a CODE2040 Fellow. The next year, she became a role model for Google's 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 magazine's 2016 College Women of the Year.

Her Software: We Read Too

Kaya started working on 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 that 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 use. This was made possible by people donating money to support it.

The idea for the app came from Kaya's own experience. She found it hard to find diverse books when she was young. In 2014, she told BET: "When I tried to find books with characters of color, I had to look in special sections or search for a long time. I made this app so that books by and for people of color can be found easily in one place." In 2015, Michelle Obama honored Kaya for her work on the app at the Black Girls Rock! awards.

By April 2017, the app had been downloaded 15,000 times. By March 2020, it listed almost 1,000 book titles. To reach these numbers, Kaya started an Indiegogo campaign in March 2017. Her goal was 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 update the iOS version. By mid-April, she had raised more than her first 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

In 2015, Kaya spoke at BookNet Canada's 10th annual Tech Forum. She talked about how important it is for children from all backgrounds to see diverse characters in books. She encouraged the publishing industry to add information about authors' backgrounds. This would help people find diverse writers and books more easily.

Kaya has also written for news websites like TechCrunch and Model View Culture. She has appeared on podcasts like Another Round and Code Newbie to talk about her work.

Kaya volunteers as a mentor with 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 related to automatically fixing software on devices using push notifications.

Awards and Honors

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