Emtithal ‘Emi’ Mahmoud is a Sudanese poet and an activist who won the 2015 Individual World Poetry Slam championship. In 2018, she became an UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador. Mahmoud was born in Darfur, Sudan and moved with her family to Yemen when she was a toddler.

Mahmoud first encountered spoken word poetry as an undergraduate at Yale University. She joined ¡Oyé!, a spoken-word group affiliated with the Latino Cultural Center on campus, then the Yale Slam Team. Mahmoud was chosen as one of the BBC’s 100 Most Inspirational Women in 2015, and wrote the poem ‘The Things She Told Me’ to mark the honour. She published her debut poetry collection, ‘Sister’s Entrance’, in 2018.