Salimah Valiani is a poet, activist, independent researcher and visiting lecturer at the Centre for Researching Education and Labour, University of Witwatersrand. She was born in Calgary, Canada of a Ugandan mother and Tanzanian father and began writing poetry in 1977, at the age of seven, in English and French. She is author of 29 leads to love, the 2022 Winner of The International Book Award for Contemporary Poetry. She was the 2012 Recipient of the Feminist Economics Rhonda Williams Prize – an award recognising feminist scholarship and activism in the spirit of the African American economist and advocate, Rhonda Williams
