Taymí was born in Cuba, in a place where dreaming beyond what you could see could feel almost impossible. She grew up in Bolondrón, Matanzas, but summers brought trips to Varadero, Cuba's most famous stretch of beach and one of the island's great windows to international tourism. There, glimpses of a world beyond her own captured her imagination: tourists arriving from places she had never seen, distant voices speaking languages she didn't understand, and small encounters with a place that seemed impossibly far away.

Before she understood any of it, she built her own version of it. As a child, Taymí would pretend to speak English with her friends, making up words and sounds she decided belonged to the language and delivering them with absolute conviction. Her friends played along, but that English was hers alone. Years later, she would find herself living in the United States, where English became the language of the life she had once only imagined.

America was everything she had invented in her mind — and nothing like it.

Belonging proved harder. The daughter of a white mother and a Black father, Taymí experienced bullying and the disorienting feeling of not fitting neatly on either side of a racial line.

Books, however, had always felt like somewhere she could belong. As a child, she loved even the smell of their pages. That love stayed with her as she grew up and raised two children, each extraordinary in entirely different ways.

Her son was identified as gifted in the first grade and remained in gifted education through middle school — a fiercely bright child whose curiosity and potential gave her an early understanding of what can happen when a child's mind is recognized and given room to grow. Scholastic Book Fair days became a favorite ritual. Taymí may have been just as excited to browse the books for herself, but when it came to her son, there was one simple rule: if he wanted a book, she bought it.

Her daughter arrived with a very different kind of extraordinary. Born with Trisomy 18 and given less than a year to live, she defied that prognosis and lived for thirteen years — teaching her mother something entirely different about possibility, perseverance, and how little anyone can truly predict about the life ahead.

Her children taught her, in completely different ways, never to underestimate what lives inside a child.

Loss would eventually take both her husband and her daughter.

And still, Taymí rebuilt.

Years later, a spinal injury left her unable to move. From bed, she built a company. It failed.

So she rebuilt again.

In less than three months, she wrote, edited, designed, and published five books.

She poured herself into every book — shaping the illustrations, refining every page, and making countless creative decisions until each piece came together as she envisioned it. It was painstaking work, fueled by the same stubborn determination that had carried her through so much, and through that process, she learned that beauty isn’t always found in the polished, but in the true.

And somewhere between everything that had fallen apart and everything she kept creating anyway, the idea behind U.G.L.I.est was born.

Not from privilege.
Not from credentials.
Not from having all the answers.
From insistence.