Princess Watassa Meets Thirty-Seven Children
by Cindy Hunter Morgan
[Editor’s Note: Click on the triptych below to view it at full size.]
Cindy Hunter Morgan teaches in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities (RCAH) at Michigan State University and serves as Interim Director of the RCAH Center for Poetry at MSU. She is the author of a full-length poetry collection and two chapbooks. Harborless (Wayne State University Press) is a 2018 Michigan Notable Book and the winner of the 2017 Moveen Prize in Poetry. Apple Season won the Midwest Writing Center’s 2012 Chapbook Contest, judged by Shane McCrae. The Sultan, The Skater, The Bicycle Maker won The Ledge Press 2011 Poetry Chapbook Award. She writes regularly for Murder Ballad Monday, a blog devoted to the exploration of the murder ballad tradition in folk and popular music. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in a variety of journals, including The American Journal of Poetry, Tin House Online, Salamander, The Pinch, and West Branch.
What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Princess Watassa Meets Thirty-Seven Children”? The center portion of this triptych is part of a larger book-length manuscript that recounts and imagines my grandma’s work as “Princess Watassa.” Though the Michigan Tuberculosis Association no longer exists as an organization, I found boxes of Association correspondence at Michigan State University’s Archives, which houses the Association’s history. This correspondence includes hundreds of letters from school children who wrote to my grandma, letters from Association executives who booked presentations, and newspaper clippings and itineraries. I sorted through files, touching things my grandma touched, eavesdropping on conversations from another century. The documents are both material and vestigial. It was a very strange thing to discover them – a kind of posthumous contact.
Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.
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Submissions
Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again September 15, 2025. Submit here.
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