Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and raised in Montgomery, Alabama, Liyu is driven to fight for an intersectional environmental justice movement, particularly in the Deep South. At Duke, Liyu studied Public Policy and African and African-American studies. She served as the President of Duke NAACP, where she organized bi-weekly STI and HIV testing, voter registration drives, and prison advocacy campaigns in Durham County Jail. Her passions can be most captured by her senior thesis, “Carcerality and Climate Justice: Alabama’s Incarcerated Population and the Prison-to-Pollution Pipeline,” where she researched the intersections of prisons and environmental justice.