Emtithal "Emi" Mahmoud is a poet who won the 2015 Individual World Poetry Slam championship.
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Early life
Mahmoud was born in Darfur, Sudan, and moved with her family to Yemen when she was a toddler, then to the United States in 1998. When she was seven she returned to Sudan where her parents took part in a protest after the government stopped paying teachers. She and friends his under the bed with fear. She says that she learnt then of the value of education. Mahmoud attended Julia R. Masterman High School in Philadelphia and won Leonore Annenberg's scholarship, a prize covering all costs for four years at any college in the United States.
Poetry
Mahmoud first encountered spoken word poetry as an undergraduate at Yale University. She joined a ¡Oyé!, a spoken-word group affiliated with the Latino Cultural Center on campus, then the Yale Slam Team.
Mahmoud's 2015 winning poem was called Mama. The piece was a tribute to Mahmoud's mother, who was unable to be in the audience that day; she was in Sudan attending the funeral of Mahmoud's grandmother who had died on the first day of the competition.
Activism
Since high school, Mahmoud has also been an activist advocating for attention to the continuing violence in Darfur. She was on the BBC's 100 Women list of "the most inspirational women across the world in 2015," and she was invited to a 2016 roundtable with President Obama when he visited the Islamic Society of Baltimore.
