As a kid, Kaya Thomas enjoyed reading. “No matter how old I was, what I was going through, how I felt in any moment, a book was always a means of escape” according to Thomas sometime in 2015. “A way to dive into a new world and become a new character.”

In high school, Kaya Thomas was a self-proclaimed "nerdy black girl." whose love for books grew. She’d read three or four a week, seeking some sort of comfort in their pages because she “felt very different than most of my peers.”

As she grew from the "nerdy black girl" she was to a matured black woman, she began to pay more attention to how the characters in her favourite books were described. “When I was a teenager I began to realise that a lot of the books I read didn’t have characters that looked like me, realising that made me feel invisible.”

Studying computer science at Dartmouth college, she realised she had to do something that could bring her to the place of the characters and feel visible. This actually led her to create a free app called We Read Too, where young readers can browse more than 600 books featuring black, Latino, Asian, Indigenous, and other non-white characters written by people of colour, with readers of colour in mind. The app targets children and young adults of colour.

We Read Too is a book resource app that includes hundreds of books written by authors of colour featuring characters of colour.

“Young people should be able to see themselves represented in literature, so they know that their stories are important and that there are authors who celebrate their background and show the real lives of people like them,”

“When young people don’t see themselves represented positively in books, TV, movies and other forms of media, that erasure really harms self-image and how you perceive yourself as you grow up,”

According to Thomas, “My goal for We Read Too is for it to be the primary directory that contains thousands of works by authors of colour of various genres. I want to celebrate these authors and for them to always have a place where their work is celebrated and showcased. “

Thomas plans to launch an Android version of the app this year, and redesign the iOS version with new features.