Confident, beautiful and with a bright pink towel wrapped round her head I can’t help but instantly fall for Michaela’s charms when we meet outside Stratford Circus to discuss her debut album and upcoming performance at the venue. “Sorry about the towel,” the 21-year-old poet smiles, “I'm washing my hair.”

With such a self assured air, it’s hard to imagine the Chadwell Heath resident has struggled with low self esteem, but it was this battle with her self worth that sparked her route into poetry.

“I found poetry about three years and three months ago,” she enthusiastically recalls, “It was May 22, I literally woke up and I said out loud ‘I am beautiful’. It was something I found hard to say when I was younger because I grew up with a lot of insecurities from going to an all girls’ school where people are not always that nice. A friend had suggested saying it, so I woke up, said it and wrote it down and then I wrote I’m God’s image, I’m the next top model, and I wrote a poem. Two weeks later I went to a bar and performed it, and I have never stopped.”

Her latest album, Fixing Barbie, features similar personal testimonies as well as observations on familiar female issues, which she mixes with a heavy dose of humour. “It’s like a stand-up show that rhymes,” the artist says of her performance.

As for the album title itself, Michaela explains: “I use Barbie to represent the female everywhere. Barbie looks great and she is really pretty but the problem with her is that there is nothing inside, she is filled with air. So my point is, in order to fix Barbie you need to fill her up with things like self esteem, self worth, knowledge, some character, some personality, a sense of reality, that’s fixing Barbie!”

So does Michaela feel fixed now? “No, I feel like Barbie,” she laughs. “It’s a process, it’s basically saying, ‘I keep getting on the scales and weighing myself, why do I keep doing it?’ It’s not saying you need to be like this or that, it’s saying, ‘I feel like a mess right now, do you as well?’ ”

Coming from an inner-city school with a “bad reputation”, Michaela, who recently won a place at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, could have found herself going down a different path, but says her faith saved her.

“I started going to church when I was 18, and I thought, ‘I like this life, I’m going to aspire not to be the things I can’t help to be.' I probably would have ended up pregnant and on the dole, so I think the only thing that has kept me on track is knowing there is a higher power.”

Whether or not a higher power is at work, Michaela certainly speaks for a generation, delivering a frank and positive message on image and self worth that is long overdue.

Michaela performs at Stratford Circus on Saturday, August 29, 7pm. Tickets: 0844 357 2625, www.stratford-circus.com (£15 including album). Information: www.myspace.com.michaelathepoet