She has debated with presidents, been comforted by the Dalai Lama, and been called one of the world’s most inspiring women – but it’s as a poet that Emtithal Mahmoud truly shines

Emtithal Mahmoud was brimming with rage and misery when she sat down to write her poem Mama. Her grandmother had just died in Sudan, her mother was on a plane to the funeral and she felt consumed by anger.

“I wrote it in one of the darkest times of my life,” she says. “It felt like my grandmother had survived everything, the war, famine, and in the end it was not just cancer, it was lack of access to proper medical research. It was a very dark time. And that poem helped me get through it.”

Hours after writing Mama, Mahmoud – also known as Emi, who was born in Darfur but moved to the US from Yemen as a four-year-old – performed it at the 2015 Individual World Poetry Slam Championship in Washington DC – and won the competition. Full of fury, Mama opens as a man asks Mahmoud: “Hey yo sistah, you from the motherland? … ’cause you got a little bit of flavor in you, / I’m just admiring what your mama gave you.” It becomes a paean to Mahmoud’s mother, who “can reduce a man to tattered flesh without so much as blinking”, who “walks into a war zone and has warriors cowering at her feet”.

“Don’t talk about the motherland unless you know / that being from Africa means waking up an / afterthought in this country. / Don’t talk about my flavor unless you know / that my flavor is insurrection, it is rebellion, / resistance,” Mahmoud recited, bringing the audience to their feet and receiving a perfect score.

In London on a flying visit to the UK – she’s been in Birmingham speaking on Philanthropy Age’s How to Do Good tour – Mahmoud is overflowing with charisma. She has so much to talk about, from working in refugee camps in Greece (she pulls out a wallet made from a life jacket a boy on Lesbos gave her) to meetings with the Dalai Lama (“He said: ‘There’s a lot of pain in Darfur and in Sudan’ and I was like, ‘There is’. He held my hand for a bit and I said, ‘I’m working on it and we’re with you.’”)

But she’s getting ahead of herself. She turned 22 shortly after winning the slam, at which point her life started to become a little surreal. Still a student at Yale, where she was studying molecular, cellular and developmental biology and anthropology, 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.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Overflowing with charisma … Emi Mahmoud. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

In the middle of her exams, she was invited by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to speak at a nuclear ethics conference. “It was terrifying,” she says. “I thought, ‘They’re going to use me. I’m going to be a token.’” One of her professors told her: “Everyone is going to come with their own agenda but you stay true to what it is you want to get out there.”

Mahmoud went; she listened; she spoke for an hour, interspersing her poetry into her talk, putting a human face on the refugee crisis and on the atrocities of Darfur. She’s since taken part in round-table discussions at the White House, including with Barack Obama, she’s opened for Ban Ki-Moon at UN events, and spoke in New Delhi to launch the 100 Million child advocacy campaign alongside Nobel peace prize winner Kailash Satyarthi. She’s nearly always the youngest person in a room.

She’s recently published her debut poetry collection, Sister’s Entrance. It moves from the personal – love poems, the experience of growing up a black Muslim in the US – to the political. Head Over Heels stems from a question she was asked at her first UN general assembly meeting: “The one-millionth refugee just left South Sudan; can you comment?”

“Our once country— / all west, and south, and east, and north— / so restless, the Nile couldn’t hold us together / and you ask me to summarise?” she writes. Her performance is blistering. “I wrote it afterwards, I was furious.”

Her poetry, she says, expresses the real emotions behind the headlines. “It’s hard, in our world, when you see violence everywhere – you’re desensitised to it,” she says. “What I try to do is to change the approach, so it helps people feel like it’s OK to feel again and to recognise that it is scary and it does hurt, and , it’s OK to cry. And people do cry.”

Since she’s graduated, she’s returned frequently to Sudan, setting up “poetry town halls” for locals to share thoughts in a safe space. Earlier this year, she walked from Darfur to Khartoum in 30 days to raise awareness for peace, in what she dubbed the One Girl Walk. Thousands joined her en route; sometimes, they marched through tanks. She was scared. She performed her poetry.

My parents got death threats every single day when I was walking. We were constantly under surveillance

“My parents got death threats every single day when I was walking. We were ... constantly under surveillance,” she says. “Their narrative was: ‘The Sudanese government has been conducting a weapons recollection programme and putting more security out there into the country, and security equals peace. Because there is security, there is peace, and this girl is walking because she wants to prove Sudan is safe.’ My narrative was: ‘If we can walk together we can work together, we can create and inspire a collective responsibility for peace. We’ll bring the peace together.’”

Debut collection … Sisters’ Entrance. Photograph: Andrews McMeel

Mahmoud will return to Sudan in July, where she has big plans for more community groups and workshops around the country. Mostly she is volunteering, saving the money she makes from events “run by magazines or businesses that pay very well … to do the kind of work you can’t get funding for.”

Mahmoud writes to explore her feelings; she performs, she says, because she has somehow found herself this platform. “A lot of things are said about people like me - young people, black people, Muslim people, women,” she says. “The reason I perform is to answer those things, to be a voice I didn’t really have growing up.”