A bit about me
I grew up a first-generation Egyptian-American immigrant, fluent in what other people expected of me and very good at meeting it. But my curiosities were always driven by what made me feel alive — writing and theater, art and tennis, ceramics and Spanish linguistics — and aliveness and safety stayed in constant negotiation.
I started my career asking what education is and how we learn: teaching fifth grade with Teach For America, earning a Master of Science in Teaching, helping scale Teach For All and Girls Who Code, training as a doula, co-founding a forest preschool. Then motherhood cracked it all open. Protecting my kids' right to imagine and make freely, I began to reclaim my own creative practice — and rethink what liberatory education means.
The reclamation came in bursts — screenprinting as activism, weekly essays on what is now a top-100 parenting Substack, a YA fantasy manuscript, a memoir proposal, zine collaborations, Map the Load. The projects got bigger and more ambitious, and my kids ran their own alongside mine — a positive feedback loop of creativity in our home.
Last October, desperate to help my daughter's spelling after every tool failed her, I opened a Replit account and built a prototype. It became Wyla, the spelling app Russ Simmons and I are now co-founding.
I'm cerebral in my mothering and caring in my making, and I've stopped choosing between them. I study one question, in my kids and in myself: what it takes to break the cages on our imagination — and who we become when we do that work together.
