Thomas Willshire has been named executive director of the American University in Cairo Press, effective September 1. He has more than 30 years of academic and trade publishing experience, having worked most recently at Cambridge University Press, as well as Oxford University Press, Continuum International Publishing, Random House, and HarperCollins. He began his career in bookselling in Milwaukee and Chicago before joining Barnes & Noble's buying team at its New York headquarters.
Willshire will work from the Cairo office. AUC Press also has offices in New York and is distributed, outside Egypt, by IPS/Two Rivers (in North America) and by IPS UK (in the U.K., Europe, and the rest of the world). The AUC Press also operates bookstores in Egypt. It also sponsors the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, which supports contemporary Arab literature in translation (see this year's shortlist below).