"She just loves and revels in words."

Her opening line is "I am Jemma and I am immortal!" Jemma was honored yesterday in London, named the first place winner in the 16 and under category of the "Write Up Your Street" competition. Jemma is a native of London and moved to Houston about a year ago with her family. Her father took the position of technical director of Houston Grand Opera.

"Written words are for me the glue which keeps my existence held fast in a semblance of stability," she writes. "Without words, it would all come crashing round my ears, turning bright sunshine into darkest night. Poetry fills my soul with delightful hues of life's momentary escapes into bliss, and torment. Language is my paint and my keyboard is my brush."

"My heartbeat is written on a stave, with crescendos and diminuendos, tacit bars and heart-stopping glissandos, But my breath is the libretto, with such glorious poetry and anarchic rhyme that I can't make sense of it at all."

Jemma is a 10 year old fifth-grader. She was born not breathing and spent the first six weeks of life in intensive care. At age one, Jemma was diagnosed with cerebral palsy. The disease affects muscle control.

Jemma wasn't able to attend the ceremony honoring her writing but did videotape an acceptance speech - her voice was synthesized by a computer. She types words by using a xylophone stick.

She attends a public school in the Houston Independent School District, Mark Twain Elementary, a magnet school highlighting a literary development program. Her teacher, Pansy Gee, says, "She wows me."

A contest judge said, "Jemma Leech's winning entry...stunned us all with its imagery, craft and finesse." It was an essay describing a winter scene near her home in London.

At the age of five, Jemma was able to expand on her ability to communicate, previously limited to tapping out codes for "yes" and "no", by beginning to spell using flashcards, typing out poems on the computer keyboard. Her mother said,"Poetry is one of her big things. She can write poems i a few words to say the same things that would take a few paragraphs. She has the power of language. She just loves and revels in words. I have to go to the dictionary."


Jemma's winning essay: "A Hawarden Grove Christmas"

I remember in London the winters were warm and wet. No snow or ice, just rainy gumboot-puddled walks in Brockwell Park, while the summer-packed paddling pool filled of its own accord with rainwater, autumn leaves and rainbows of crisp bags.
We disappeared in the secret garden underneath palisades of sleeping creeping clematis and wisteria, swapping the dry dark with the wet light as we trailed the paving maze to the fishpond at its heart.
Blackbirds waded in patches of newly dug earth, taking worms from the mud as an avocet might from a turning tide-bare beach. A robin called to me from the crumbling wall, saying 'spring will be here soon, believe me, believe me.' His red chest puffed out with pride as he sang me a song of love and fidelity. Flattery became him as I cried at his song, and he flew off knowing I'd believed in his truth. From the far end of the garden, I heard him begin his flirtation again with another open heart.
From the top of the hill in the park we had watched fireworks break out all across the city that Fifth of November, as if in domino from common to common. But on that Christmas Day the mist had come down, the park was an island and we were cut off from the mass of humanity beyond the mist. It was just me, my brother and sister, and our weary parents inhaling the fog like perfume on a cloud of silage steam grateful fro the relief it brought from the stench of London. That mist-bound land was our kingdom that day, and I was its princess, adorned with a crown of diamond drips and drops, soon dried by the warmth of our terraced palace on Hawarden Grove.