My Story.

The Question Nobody Could Answer

It happened during an ordinary classroom visit. I asked a room full of kids a simple question: had anyone here ever met an engineer? Out of dozens of hands, only a couple went up. That moment revealed something bigger than a vocabulary gap. Most of these kids had never even considered engineering as something they could grow into, because they had never seen anyone who looked like them doing it.

I left that classroom thinking about my own path into engineering, and how much of it came down to exposure I almost didn't get. If I hadn't stumbled into the right class, the right mentor, the right moment, I might have never known this career existed for someone like me either. I didn't want that to be left to chance for the next kid.

So instead of waiting for someone else to write the book I wished I'd had, I started writing it myself. That question became the seed for What Can I Be? STEM Careers from A to Z.

A Career in Engineering First

I've spent more than two decades as a mechanical and project engineer, working my way up to senior project engineer in the energy sector, a career that started well before my first book in 2019 and has continued right alongside it. That work meant managing budgets, timelines, and teams as much as it meant math and machinery. Somewhere along the way I realized that the leadership side of the job mattered just as much as the technical side, which is part of why I went back for a Ph.D. in Leadership Studies from North Carolina A&T State University, on top of my B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and M.S. in Engineering Management from UNC Charlotte.

Earning my Project Management Professional (PMP) certification came from that same instinct: I wanted the credential to match the work I was already doing, leading complex projects from concept to completion.

None of that shows up on the page in a way a five-year-old could point to, but it's the reason my books don't read like a career pamphlet. I've lived the version of engineering I'm asking kids to imagine themselves into, and that hands-on experience is what keeps the stories grounded in what the career actually looks and feels like.

Writing the Book I Needed as a Kid

What Can I Be? STEM Careers from A to Z introduces the STEM Crew, a cast of kids who look like the ones I have met in classrooms around the world, each paired with a career, letter by letter. I wanted every letter of the alphabet to double as a door: A for astronaut, D for doctor, and on through the whole range of STEM careers kids rarely see broken down for them at that age.

Writing it as an alphabet book was deliberate. Parents and teachers were already reaching for ABC books to teach letters, so I wanted the format doing double duty, teaching the alphabet and planting the idea that any of these careers could belong to the child holding the book.

The response from classrooms told me the book was doing more than one job. Kids started asking follow-up questions about the careers on the page, and some teachers built entire lesson units around it. That reception is part of why I pushed to get it translated into five languages, so the same door could open for kids well outside the classrooms where I'd first tested it, alongside a companion journal, a coloring and activity book, and a teacher's edition built for K-2 classrooms.

Growing a Whole Library

One book turned into sixteen. Once the STEM Crew existed, I kept finding more places to take them. The STEM Crew Kids Adventures series follows the same characters through hands-on engineering challenges like building a balloon-powered car, because reading about a career is one thing, but watching a character actually build something is what makes it stick.

The 10-Minute STEM Experiments collection came out of a much more practical problem: parents and teachers kept telling me they wanted to do more hands-on STEM at home or in the classroom, but they didn't have hours to plan it. So I built four books, one for science, one for technology, one for engineering, and one for math, each with experiments short enough to run in the time it takes to boil pasta.

Closing the STEM Gap and The STEM Playbook are the two books in the library not written for kids at all. Those are for the adults doing the work, educators, companies, and parents, who kept asking me for the strategy behind the stories, not just the stories themselves.

Helping Other Experts Tell Their Story

Once other professionals saw what What Can I Be? had done, a lot of them told me some version of the same thing: they had their own field, their own story, and no idea how to turn it into a book a kid would actually want to read. I recognized that gap immediately, because I had been standing in it myself not long before.

Through Inspired Authors Publishing, I now help other professionals do what I did: turn years of career expertise into a Career Storybook that introduces kids to a field they have never seen represented on the page. I walk each author through the same questions I had to answer for my own book: who is this story really for, what career are we introducing, and how do we make a child want to grow into it.

Most of the people I work with aren't writers by training. They're nurses, engineers, pilots, entrepreneurs, people who know their field cold but have never written a page of a children's book. That's exactly who this process is built for.

Taking the Mission to the Stage

My TEDx talk at the University of South Africa, "Why Kids Can't Be What They've Never Seen," turned that original classroom moment into a call to action. Standing on that stage, I told the same story I'd been telling in classrooms for years, but to a room that could carry it much further than I ever could alone.

Since then, I speak at schools, conferences, and corporate events on closing the STEM gap, representation, and building a career, and a business, around engineering. Every audience is a little different, but the through-line is always the same: kids can't become what they've never seen, and it's on the adults in the room to change that.

I also host The STEM Blueprint Show, a series of conversations with the people shaping the next generation of STEM leaders, educators, engineers, and entrepreneurs who are all doing their own version of what I set out to do: making a STEM career feel possible for someone who's never seen it modeled before.

I started STEM Crew Magazine for the same reason: a free digital publication that puts STEM content directly in the hands of students, parents, and educators between books and between episodes, so the mission doesn't have to wait for the next big platform to reach someone.