Africa World Press
publisher
Africa World Press (AWP) is a publishing company founded in 1983 by Kassahun Checole in Trenton, New Jersey, United States, with a mission to publish books on the history, culture and politics of Africa and the African diaspora. Two years later, The Red Sea Press was added as an imprint of AWP, with a primary focus on the Horn of Africa, and taking on the role of distributor for books on and about Africa and people of African descent in the continent as well as the diaspora.
Background and output
The president and publisher of Africa World Press and The Red Sea Press is Kassahun Checole, who grew up in Eritrea. He attended Haile Selassie University, and in 1971 went to further his education at the State University of New York at Binghamton (SUNY Binghampton), where he developed his interest in Pan-African movements; after earning an undergraduate degree in political science and African-American studies and his master's in sociology, he took up a position as a professor of sociology and African studies at Rutgers University. He also taught courses at other higher education institutions, including El Colegio de Mexico and the University of Johannesburg, and realised early in his teaching career that there was a dearth of relevant books dealing with African and African-American issues, and that whatever material was produced was not reaching its market.
Aiming to address this deficiency, in 1983 Checocle began producing books from his home, an early title being Ngugi Wa Thiong'o's Barrel of a Pen. Other notable titles from the 1980s include Under a Soprano Sky by Sonia Sanchez and Afrocentricity by Molefi Asante. Distribution proved to be a problem, however, as Checole noted in a 2019 interview: "I couldn’t find anyone who would carry my books. The traditional distributors in the United States were sympathetic, but they were not willing to carry black books in a significant way or promote them in a significant way. I was being told again and again that it’s good to publish black books, but there’s no buyers.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Africa World Press” is publisher. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Africa, World and Press, not as a finished interpretation.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q56874468. VIAF identifies the subject as 311354818. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1983, 1971 and 2019.
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This entry incorporates text from “Africa World Press” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.