Photos this page,
courtesy of the Siegel family.
It didn’t take Annie Siegel long to discover that there was
something special about her daughter, Isabel. From the moment
she learned to read at 6, the little girl was obsessively writing,
developing her vivid imagination, and then capturing those flights of
fantasy in words.
“On her first day of kindergarten, I brought her teacher a stack
of notebooks that Isabel had filled up,” Annie recalls. “That’s why we
bought her a laptop. The notebooks were piling up everywhere.”
These days, Annie and her husband, Scott, are rarely surprised
what their daughter, now an eighth-grader at Shaker Heights Middle
School, can accomplish when she puts pen to paper. This year – her
first year in Power of the Pen, a writing club for Ohio seventh- and
eighth-graders – Isabel took first place in all three rounds of the state
competition and earned three first place titles at the regional level, an
accomplishment unprecedented in Power of the Pen competition.
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