A duck drinks from the water at Tollgate Drain Wetlands. August 15, 2025.
Published September 5, 2025
The Tollgate Drain Wetlands in Lansing Township are part of the region’s stormwater system, designed to collect and filter runoff before it reaches the Grand River. But next spring, visitors will find something new at the water’s edge: poetry.
Lansing Poet Laureate Ruelaine Stokes is turning public infrastructure into a platform for creative expression, using her “We Are Water” Poetry Contest to encourage local residents to consider their relationship to water.
Lansing Poet Laureate Ruelaine Stokes. COURTESY PHOTO.
Stokes is one of 23 poet laureates selected nationwide for the 2025 Academy of American Poets fellowship, which awards $50,000 to each laureate in recognition of their work and to fund a civic poetry project. Stokes's project, “We Are Water”, includes a regional poetry contest, ten free writing workshops, and lectern signs along the walking paths at Tollgate featuring poems by five contest winners.
“When you put poems in public spaces, places where people walk, rest, and observe, you invite them to see water, and our relationship to it, in a new way,” Stokes said. “The theme of the contest is water and the human connection to it. That could be a memory, a fear, a feeling—anything that helps someone see water not just as a utility, but as something essential and emotional.”
For Stokes, “We Are Water” is both a poetic idea and a literal one.
As she explained at the 2025 Fate of the Earth: Our Waters symposium, “Water is all around us; it’s so much a part of our lives. The connection between our body, our blood, our arteries, our capillaries, and how much of that is like river systems—rivers and streams. The more you start thinking about water, the more you see that we are connected to water in a very vital, necessary, immediate way.”
That idea carries through in the way the project is designed. Stokes explained that she wants to make poetry more visible and lasting in public spaces. Inspired by the durable lectern-style signs she’d seen at Lake Lansing Park and in East Lansing, she opted for similar displays at Tollgate. These signs, she said, allow poems to remain outdoors year-round, inviting repeated reflection over time.
Lectern sign at Tollgate Wetlands.
The Tollgate site was chosen, not only for its visibility, but for its role in the local water system. Constructed in the late 1990s as a nature-based alternative to costly sewer upgrades, the Tollgate Wetlands handle runoff from surrounding neighborhoods and roadways without relying extensively on buried pipes.
Tollgate was created to mimic natural processes, and “We Are Water” uses that infrastructure as a prompt: What does it mean to live with water, to notice it, to protect it, to think about where it goes after it leaves our homes.
To answer these questions, and to deepen community engagement, Stokes has brought together a wide network of partners, including the Arts Council of Greater Lansing, the Ingham County Drain Commissioner’s Office, the Lansing Economic Area Partnership, the RCAH Center for Poetry at MSU, the Red Cedar Writing Project, and the Lansing Poetry Club. Their support ensures the contest will reach writers of all ages and backgrounds, from curious students to seasoned poets.
“We’re not expecting people to be professional poets,” Stokes said. “We just want them to take a moment to observe, to imagine, and to put that into words.”
Additional support from the MSU Water Alliance and the City of Lansing has helped ground the project in ongoing local conversations about infrastructure, stewardship, and equity.
At a time when Michigan communities are facing aging infrastructure, issues of water equity, and environmental resilience, “We Are Water” offers a creative path into urgent conversations.
Stokes’s approach builds on a 2023 collaboration with former Lansing Poet Laureate Laura Apol. My Secret Lansing, a community writing project, invited residents to reflect on meaningful places around the city. With “We Are Water”, she is shifting the lens to focus on place-based writing rooted in ecological awareness.
The “We Are Water” Poetry Contest runs now through October 17, 2025, and is open to residents of Ingham, Clinton, and Eaton counties, ages 10 and up. For contest guidelines, writing prompts, and submission details, visit ruelainestokes.com.
Story by Aja Witt