Founded in 2004 | We Will Tell Our Own Story
About UWP
Our Mission
Universal Write Publications publishes rigorous scholarship that reclaims the rich histories of the culturally diverse peoples who make up our society. Our focus is to publish a variety of topics through the framework of Black Scholars who write through the African lens: the lived experiences of the diaspora without compromising the rigor of academic scholarship that dignifies the essence of research, data analysis, and the scientific methods of the academy.
Our Focus
UWP Books is determined to reimagine, raise the bar, and pivot the cultural paradigm on its axis to shift the narrative from Black people being the subject to Black scholars being the authoritative voice and instrument of peoples, cultures, and the social construction of race.
We call on Black Academic Excellence to assert their agency and engage in the liberating act of writing about how other cultures ideas, belief systems, behaviors, fears, thought processes, histories, and lived experiences spill into Blackness and converge into the systematic racism that was woven in the fabric of the global marginalization of Black and Brown peoples.
Meet Our Founder
Dr. Ayo Sekai
Dr. Ayo Sekai is the CEO and publisher of Universal Write Publications, LLC. Since founding UWP in 2004, Sekai has prioritized publishing academic titles that demonstrate a commitment to African agency through scholar-activism, women-centered initiatives, and #BlackAcademicExcellence. As a social scientist and author, she understands the unique challenges of the academy and the social, global implications of being a Black, immigrant from the Global South.
In the legacy of prominent Howard University scholars, such as Vice-President Kamala Harris, (who shares Sekai's Jamaican heritage); Chadwick Boseman, Ron Walters, and Ralph Bunche, Sekai is a proud Howard University Ph.D. alum, from the Department of Political Science. Her research specializations are Black Politics and International Relations. As a linguistic activist, she is keenly attuned to social justice corrupted by "dog whistle" and racist rhetoric in politics and linguistic imperialism framed through language inequity and inequality, law, immigration, public policy, and education as it relates to Black and Brown people.
She worked as an associate publisher and executive editor in New York and was editor of 5ive Borough Magazine , New York's premier hip hop magazine. Sekai began her film experience, fiction writing, and poetry in New York, where she also taught in the public school system as an English teacher.
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