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When Meg Muthupandiyan walks through a park, she sees more than trails, trees and scenic overlooks. She sees poems waiting to be discovered.
Now, thanks to a new app she created, visitors to parks and public lands around the world can experience the beautiful areas they’re seeing through poetry.
Muthupandiyan, a writing professor at the University of Wisconsin-Superior and founder of the nonprofit Locus Poetica/Poetry in the Parks, Inc., recently launched Locus Poetica, a location-based poetry app that connects poems to the landscapes that inspired them. Using the app’s interactive map, visitors can discover poetry connected to parks, trails, historic sites and protected lands, creating a literary experience rooted in the places they explore.
The idea emerged from Muthupandiyan’s work as an environmental writer and poet.
“One day I was walking through my local park and thought, ‘We have geocaching. Why don’t we have poetry caching?'” she recalled.
That simple question became the foundation for a much larger vision.
Founded in 2023, Poetry in the Parks seeks to make poetry more accessible while fostering deeper connections between people and the landscapes around them. Traditional poetry installations can be expensive and difficult for communities to sustain. Muthupandiyan envisioned a digital alternative that could reach audiences anywhere.
“As I and the board were trying to figure out how to create an accessible, global poetry installation, we realized everybody’s on their phone all the time,” she said. “Why not make it a digital platform so people can access poetry on their phones?”
The result is Locus Poetica, which is available on iOS and Android devices. The app allows park visitors and other users to discover well-known poems that are connected to specific locations, and also allows contemporary poets to submit poems inspired by public and sacred lands. Visitors to Cape Cod National Seashore, for example, can encounter Mary Oliver’s celebrated poem “In Blackwater Woods” while exploring the landscape that inspired it. They can also write and submit poems of their own.
Campus Collaboration
While the app is rooted in literature, its development became an interdisciplinary project that brought together expertise from across UW-Superior.
For Steven Rosenberg, professor of computer science, the project highlights the value of connecting different disciplines.
“It’s great that we can connect these two extremely different areas together, poetry on the one hand, computer science on the other hand, because they seem like they might have nothing to do with each other,” Rosenberg said.
In fall 2025, six students in Rosenberg’s Computer Science Capstone course worked with Muthupandiyan to evaluate and refine the organization’s vision for the platform. Their work helped shape the user experience, technical design and long-term sustainability of the project.
“I am so grateful for the feedback that Dr. Rosenberg and his students gave when we shared our design ideas,” Muthupandiyan said. “The cost, user and administrator experience analyses they conducted helped the board understand the costs and challenges of designing an accessible public humanities app in very concrete terms.”
Opportunity Outside the Classroom
The collaboration also provided a valuable experiential learning opportunity for students.
“They know that they’re meeting a real-world need and they’re dealing with people outside their department and outside their comfort zone,” Rosenberg said.
The team ultimately helped the nonprofit focus on three primary audiences: visitors seeking poetry in public spaces, poets interested in sharing their work and land stewards looking to create literary experiences within their communities.
At launch, Locus Poetica features a deliberately modest collection of poems. The goal is to build a living archive that communities can shape over time.
Users can submit original works inspired by places that hold cultural, historical or environmental significance. Local poetry groups, artists and land managers can also collaborate to create digital poetry maps that reflect the stories of their communities.
Partnerships are already underway. The Nebraska State Poetry Society is working with Poetry in the Parks to encourage poets to contribute work inspired by local public lands. Similar conversations are underway with organizations in North Carolina and internationally.
For Muthupandiyan, the project is ultimately about community participation.
“The point is to get people really engaged on the ground level in building the content for this app,” she said.
She hopes Locus Poetica becomes more than a poetry app: a global, community-driven public humanities project that helps people experience literature and place in new ways.
The project also continues to create opportunities for UW-Superior students. As Poetry in the Parks grows, Muthupandiyan hopes to support paid internships in grant writing, nonprofit communications, marketing and community engagement.
Rosenberg said the project stands out because student work helped lay the foundation for a public-facing product.
“This was unusually successful in that we built a successful prototype which went on to become an integral part of the process that led to what is now a product that’s out there,” he said.
About UW-Superior’s Writing Program
UW-Superior’s writing program, offered both online and on campus, empowers students to use language as a tool for creativity, advocacy and community engagement. Through coursework in creative writing, professional writing and literary studies, students work closely with faculty mentors and participate in projects that connect writing to fields ranging from environmental studies and nonprofit leadership to technology and public humanities.