Rhymes and reasons for Michelle's poetic power and passion

"I speak their language. I am relevant," says the eloquent performance poet hailed by those in the know as one of the best in her profession.

Writer and fellow performance poet Benjamin Zephaniah said of her: "Her intelligence, her verbal agility and her passion means that poetry is alive once more."

But it has not always been so for the Leeds-born poet who has just finished a tour of schools with her latest work, The First Cut.

At just one day old, she was taken into care and spent the first seven years of her life in a children's home in Leeds.

Born the daughter of an Irish mother and a Caribbean father, she was diagnosed educationally subnormal when she was eventually adopted by the Scally family.

"I didn't walk or talk or respond to people," recalls Michelle.

"I'd had no proper interaction or stimulus, I didn't know what to do with toys as we had never had them at the home. As a result, I was classified subnormal."

Michelle believes that if it hadn't been for the Scallys she would have spent her life in care.

"They were my last chance. They wanted a child that was difficult to place, and I was that child. I was mixed race, older and had a lot of problems."

The Scallys were white, lived in Headingley and had five other children.

"They showed me nothing but love and, in return, I pushed them away," she says.

"When you come from my sort of background, you are so used to rejection that you don't believe in love. Even when you don't want to push them away, you can't risk being rejected again. It is about survival."

But the Scallys were not a couple to be easily beaten.

When Michelle was diagnosed as being severely dyslexic, her mother would read and read to her, and a love of reading grew.

"They really had to start from scratch with me. They were fantastic."

It was as an angry teenager that Michelle wrote her first poem. "I had a lot of issues about being mixed race and not knowing who I really was. I was not a happy person at that time. My mum suggested seeing a therapist but dad said no and, instead, said that I should write my feelings down as a way of getting them out."

It was the time of the miners' strike, the Ethiopian famine and Live Aid, which inspired Michelle to write a poem.

"I showed it to mum and dad and they gave me so much praise for it. It was a turning point in my life." But Michelle remembers the hurt when she took it into school and showed it to her RE teacher who didn't believe she had written it.

As Catholics, Mrs Scally sent Michelle's poem off to the overseas aid charity Cafod.

She couldn't believe it when someone from Cafod called and asked if Michelle would like to take her poem and a plaque on behalf of Cafod to the Pope in Rome.

"I was a really stroppy teenager at the time and I remember standing waiting to meet Pope John Paul II and being a bit ungracious about it.

"There were a lot of sick children on the front row and rather than follow the path the organisers wanted him to follow, he went straight to these children and then came to me and I looked straight into

the eyes of a kind old gentleman."

Despite this experience and the fact that her school was starting to recognise her talent, Michelle says she suffered from very low

self-esteem.

"I was first generation mixed race being brought up in Headingley with white parents at a predominantly white school. I just didn't fit in.

"When I was 14 my parents dropped me off on Chapletown Road. Walking down that road I no longer felt an oddity. I will never forget that feeling."

It was not surprising that Michelle felt at home in that part of Leeds as she was to discover that was where her birth father and a number of her siblings lived.

It was some years later, while writing her first book I Am, that she decided to track down her birth family.

"I knew I was a black woman growing up in a white world. That was all I knew. I wanted to know who I was."

She went through an agency and counselling before meeting her birth father who died a couple of years ago.

"My grandma had 10 children and they all came to Leeds aboard the Windrush. He was from St Kitts and had very dark skin which seemed to attract the Irish and Scottish women.

"Meeting my birth father and the rest of my family has allowed me to see more clearly now. It made me realise there was a reason why I was adopted.

"My parents were supportive, although my mum was a little hurt."

Michelle has two children of her own, Joseph, 20, who is about to study

Fine Art at Goldsmiths College and Olivia, 18, who is herself a budding writer.

Being a loving parent is the most important thing to Michelle. "I asked my son what he would take from my parenting and he answered 'raw love'. The love for your children is unconditional."

Michelle met and married her children's father while working for 18 months as an au pair in Switzerland after leaving college.

The marriage didn't last and Michelle returned to the UK and eventually back to Leeds, out of work with two small children. She was 24 and quite depressed about her situation.

"Income Support wasn't good but after lots of dark times I got through. I started work in a bookshop; my job was to read, buy in new material and sell. It got me back into the whole literature thing."

It was while doing a book fair at the Alhambra Theatre, in Bradford, that she met top performance poet Lemn Sissay.

"I asked him if he thought I could make it as a poet. I sent him some of my stuff and he said to go for it. From that moment, I found what I was supposed to be doing with my life. If it wasn't for Lemn I wouldn't be doing this."

It wasn't a quick rise to fame. Michelle had to work the clubs in Chapeltown performing her poetry.

As well as her poetry, Michelle has written two books about her life, I Am and She Is, as well as a number of plays.

Her most recent work, The First Cut, has been touring schools with West Yorkshire Playhouse and highlights the effects of war and violence on families.

"When I wrote The First Cut, there had been no fatalities in Afghanistan. When I performed it at one school and followed it with a workshop, there was a girl whose cousin had just been killed there.

"When I asked how the play made her feel she said, 'Fantastic, now my friends know what I am talking about and what I am feeling.' We are not teaching children about the complexities of war.

"It is this generation of 11- and 12-year-olds who have the power to stop this happening in the future."