Aya Khalil (she/her), M.Ed, is an award-winning author, librarian and freelance journalist. She holds a master’s degree in Education with a focus in teaching English as a second Language. Aya and her books have been featured in Oprah Daily, Washington Post, Teen Vogue, Yahoo!, Book Riot and USA Today. Her writing has been published in The Huffington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, Toledo Area Parent and many others. 

Aya’s picture books and board books have won numerous awards and honors including The Arab American Book Award and NCTE’s Charlotte Huck Award.

She was mentor for in We Need Diverse Books 2024.

She was a Muslim Highlights Foundation Storyteller. 

​Aya is one of the co-founders of Kidlit in Color.

Besides writing and reading, she enjoys hosting brunches, traveling and cycling (indoors and outdoors). She enjoys walking outside and sometimes jogging if she feels motivated enough! She loves taking care of her a dozen or so plants.

A little more About Me:

Born in 1987 in a small town in Egypt, Aya immigrated with her family to the United States when she was a baby. She’s lived across many different states including New Jersey, North Dakota, Michigan, South Carolina, Pennsylvania.

As a young kid she loved reading with her mom Amelia Bedelia, Little Bear, and Frog and Toad.

As she got a bit older she was obsessed with The Babysitter’s Club. She would rush to the book mobile in her small town in Lima, Ohio when it parked on her street and look for one she hadn’t read before.

She spent long summers in Egypt as a kid and teen. When she wasn’t spending her time exploring the cities with her cousins or eating fool and taameya, she would find the books she got from back home to read during the day when the sun was too hot to go out. Some of her favorites were Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, The Face on the Milk Carton, and Molly Moon