Education as a career hadnāt yet occurred to her, but a transformative experience in her senior year changed that.
āWhile completing my BA at UD, I had the opportunity to teach a
poetry course for the Upward Bound Summer Program for my Capstone
requirement. It was then that I realized I loved teaching and
interacting with students,ā FaƱa-Ruiz said. She worked as a substitute
teacher and therapeutic staff-support (TSS) paraprofessional at various
schools in northern Delaware and Philadelphia while seeking a more
permanent position.
āMy late father always told me I would be a great teacher and
stressed the importance of children being taught by educators of color,ā
she said. āHowever, I was hesitant about starting a career in
education. But my feelings changed after working with children as a
substitute and TSS worker.ā
FaƱa-Ruiz joined Las AmƩricas ASPIRA Academy in Newark as its
in-house substitute teacher in 2017 and, after several roles in between,
is now the schoolās eighth-grade English humanities teacher. (āI like
to say that they loved me so much they decided to keep me,ā FaƱa-Ruiz
said.) Her new role is a perfect fit, she said; as a student herself,
she always enjoyed English and history courses for their ability to
āopen windowsā to reveal different people, time periods, and cultures,
and she now helps her own students do the same.
āI love introducing my students to the world each day in my
classroom,ā she said. āI love witnessing their perspectives of society
and history grow and broaden.ā
FaƱa-Ruiz had long considered a future as a writer, and her drive to
broaden young minds, paired with her late fatherās advice about the
importance of representation in education, gave her the idea to create a
project for children. The idea crystallized after she and her husband,
JosƩ, began thinking of the type of literature they wanted for their
son, Joey, and daughter, Amaya.
āThe Afro-Latino Alphabet stems from a conversation between my
husband and I about representation in children's books,ā she said. āMy
husband was born and raised in the Dominican Republic and came to the
U.S. at the age of 10. He expressed how he wished more dual-language
books were available to him to assist in his English acquisition.
āWe both agreed that we wanted our two children to take pride in
their bi-cultural heritage and to see themselves in the books they read.
All children should see themselves in the books they read.ā
In June 2020, they began collaborating on The Afro-Latino Alphabet: El Alfabeto de Afro-Latino,
with FaƱa-Ruiz composing in English and JosƩ translating it to Spanish.
An alphabet book of the āA is for appleā variety, the bookās examples
include a diverse collection of Afro-Latino cultural touchstones ā āA is
for Africa, where our roots begin,ā for example, while āC is for Celia
Cruz, the Queen of Salsa.ā They published it independently through
Amazon in September 2020.
Inspired by the warm reception to The Afro-Latino Alphabet,
FaƱa-Ruiz soon had more ideas. Her next two books pay forward some of
the encouragement she received during her own educational and
professional journey. āI created Black Girls Are... to inspire Black girls like myself to go after any and all goals they may have for themselves,ā she said. āI then published Black Boys Are...
to change the narrative of Black boys with positive adjectives
describing how amazing they are. My children and my students are the
driving forces behind all my books.ā
FaƱa-Ruizās latest childrenās book, Counting With ChĆ©: Contando Con ChĆ©, was published in June 2021. Like The Afro-Latino Alphabet, Counting with ChĆ©
was written in collaboration with FaƱa-Ruizās husband, JosĆ©, and was
actually inspired by a request from a young fan of her first book.
āDuring this past Black History Month, the first-graders at ASPIRA
were studying Black authors and invited me to share my first two books,ā
she said. āOne of the students asked if I could write a dual-language
book about numbers since I already wrote one for the alphabet. So we
wrote Counting With ChƩ, which is loosely based on my husband's
childhood on a farm in the Dominican Republic and includes the Spanish
numbers.ā
FaƱa-Ruiz said that she is grateful for the inspiration and support
she has received from her family, her friends, and the ASPIRA Academy
community and continues to write, motivated by a desire to see more
childrenās books for Black and Afro-Latino children. Her earliest
favorites, The Baby-Sitters Club and Junie B. Jones series, have sparked an interest in possibly writing a book series herself, she said.
Again recalling her earliest inspirations, she said she thinks of the
days when her mother would buy works of African-American literature for
her at her elementary school book fairs. āIn her own way, she showed me
the importance of representation in books, and now I am doing the same
for my children,ā she said. āThe only difference is that I am the writer
now.ā
Article by Erin Tanner; photos courtesy of Keaira FaƱa-Ruiz
Published July 28, 2021