Meet the team

Noah Watkins

I'm a history enthusiast, a small-business owner (I run a bathroom-remodeling company in the Washington, DC area), and the dad of a young daughter. The concept that became nüNERD started when my wife was pregnant and I went looking for the books I wanted our daughter to grow up with: big subjects, told honestly, that would grow with her from a board book all the way up toward the source material itself. I couldn't find them, so I began making them, distilling classic literature and the ideas I love into something a small child could meet and enjoy.

The further I went, the clearer the gap got. There is some good classical-education content out there, but almost nothing that takes a subject like Plutarch and builds it the whole way up, from a toddler's picture book to a prep book that gets a teenager ready for the real text, armed with its themes and how it's built. So I built a system to do exactly that, one topic at a time.

Karen Gregory

None of this exists without my mom. Karen spent more than thirty years in education, most of it in the classroom as a teacher, and later as a principal and district administrator in Montgomery County, Maryland. She's retired now, which means she has the time and the trained eye to edit every manuscript, shape the teaching points, and tell me when something isn't good enough yet. She reads every book we publish, cover to cover, before it ships. She is the reason two people can hold the work to a professional editorial standard.

How two people make this many books

Here’s the part people are most curious about. We use AI, and we’d rather say so plainly. We shape every book, write its plan, and art-direct each page; several AI models draft the prose and render the illustrations inside that plan. Put simply: AI does the first draft of everything, and we do everything after. We rewrite the draft hard, pass after pass, and rework the art by hand until each page is right. Karen and I choose the subjects, fact-check the books against the sources, and read every one cover to cover before it ships. These are our books. The tools help draft them; the judgment, the editing, and the final book are ours.

If you want to know exactly what the AI does, what we do, and why we chose to work this way, the full picture is here: How we use AI.