Mahmoud was born in Darfur, Sudan, and moved, with her family, to Yemen when she was a toddler. She then moved 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 hid under the bed with fear. She says that the experience impressed on her 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. She went to Yale University where she studied Anthropology and Molecular Biology. She graduated in 2016.
Poetry
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. In 2013 she played the role of a poem reader in a short film called Haleema. 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. She also dedicated a poem to Alan Kurdi called Boy in the Sand. In 2018 she published a book of poems called Sisters' Entrance.
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. In 2017, Mahmoud took part in the How to Do Good speaker tour, performing poetry and discussing her advocacy work in Oslo, Stockholm, The Hague, Brussels, Paris, London, New York, and York in 2018. Since 2014, Mahmoud has also been advocating for the rights of sickle cell disease patients in Nepal. She gave a talk at TEDMED in 2016 and was opening speaker at a TEDxTalk in Kakuma refugee camp in 2018. In 2016 she recited a poem in front of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. Also in 2016, she launched a campaign at the 'Laureates and Leaders Summit' in New Delhi.
