Elias Wondimu is an Ethiopian activist, journalist, publisher, and founder of the knowledge production company TSEHAI Publishers. Brought up in Addis Ababa, Elias once aspired to become a surgeon. However, moved by the injustices he saw in his home country, he instead began work as a journalist, activist, and political advocate through his work at a weekly newspaper called Moged. While at the Twelfth International Ethiopian Studies conference at Michigan State University in 1994, Elias began his life in exile in the United States.

During the next twenty-four years of exile, Elias worked tirelessly towards promoting justice, and challenging ignorance and misinformation through a variety of pursuits in journalism, publishing, and social entrepreneurship. In 2018, Elias was referenced in Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s speech at the Galen Center in Los Angeles, California as one of Ethiopia’s “heroic sons” for his work and establishment of TSEHAI Publishers and was later invited to return to his home country. Since then, Elias has indeed returned, and begun a number of collaborative projects with the Ethiopian government, including the National Archives and Library Agency of Ethiopia, the new Unity Park in the Grand Palace, and a number of universities throughout the country.

Elias began his work in the Diaspora in the United States first in a journalistic capacity after being offered a position at the Ethiopian Review in Los Angeles in 1994. He served as managing editor for six years where he worked with scholars, political activists, and public intellectuals on issues of local and global interest. In this role, he was able to facilitate interviews with Ethiopian opposition leaders who had been imprisoned. During this period, in 1997, he joined PEN Center USA, serving as a member, advocate and an executive board member. Also advised and collaborated with other organizations to advocate and to financially support imprisoned journalists and their struggling families.

Later, Elias continued his journalistic pursuit of truth and just reporting through the African Tribune of which he served as editor-in-chief between 2004 and 2008, alongside Alemu Hailu (former editor of the Ethiopian Herald Newspaper) as its feature editor, Chris Abani as its book review editor, and Pulitzer Winning journalist George White as its editorial advisor.

In 1997, Elias began his career as a book publisher with the founding of TSEHAI Publishers, so named in honor of his mother Tsehai who passed away in Ethiopia that same year. Having found a void in the American book market for African books, especially those written by Africans, he initially began reprinting old texts or rare books with the intention of confronting the ignorance spread by the commonly available sources. During a brief time working as an assistant editor on UCLA’s Chicano Studies academic journal Aztlán, he was inspired to establish two academic journals with an Ethiopian focus through TSEHAI, the International Journal of Ethiopian Studies (IJES) in 2002 and later he established the Ethiopian Journal of Religious Studies (EJRS) in 2013. In 2002, Elias launched TSEHAI’s first specialized imprint, the African Academic Press to help fulfill the dire need for African American voices to be printed and heard, as Heinemann ceased publishing its African Writers Series.

Elias relocated TSEHAI Publishers to Loyola Marymount University in 2007 and established the Marymount Institute Press in conjunction with Theresia De Vroom and the Marymount Institute for Faith, Culture, and the Arts. Since then, Elias has launched Chereka Books for children’s literature, Fanos Books for self-sponsored books, and the Harriet Tubman Press with the aim to celebrate Black voices in the academic and literary world by showcasing the strength, tenacity, and perseverance of the African American experience in the hopes of empowering the next generation of , leaders, and thinkers. Since the 2011 closure of Howard University Press, TSEHAI remains the only African or African American publisher housed in an American or European university.

Throughout this time, Elias has remained an active social entrepreneur and political activist on behalf of Ethiopians in the Diaspora and in his home country. He has served on the executive board of the Black Journalists Association of Southern California (BJASC) and collaborated with the New York based Committee to Protect Journalists on several of their reports and publications like Dangerous Assignments. He created the Ethiopian Institute for Nonviolence Education and Peace Studies in the aftermath of the 2005 Ethiopian elections to create and distribute materials on nonviolent communication and constructive conflict resolution in local languages. In 2006, Elias began the annual Tsehai Conferences, an international platform to discuss the state of affairs in Ethiopia and the Diaspora.