Student Spotlight: Cass Guinto (Undergraduate English Alumna, Rutgers University-Newark)

Cass Guinto is a poet, journalist, and community organizer from North Jersey. After graduating from Bergen Community College in 2022, they completed their B.A. in English at Rutgers–Newark in 2025. As a queer Filipina/x American raised in a single parent immigrant household, their work embraces the arts as a space to explore, celebrate, and revolutionize identity. Whether it's large-scale event planning or editorial writing, they weave queerness, language, and culture into everything they do.

Working on Quilting Water, a signature director's project for the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice, writer/poet Cass Guinto (also a former Racial Justice Fellow and Quilting Water Undergraduate Prize Winner) interviewed their friends who are descended from island nations, the Dominican Republic and the Philippines, respectively, and in doing so found just how much their lives have been centered around water. One reflected: “It doesn’t seem like water loves me back, but I know it does, and I will never stop loving it.”

Read Guinto’s essay “What We Owe Water” and more about science and the environment in the Spring 2025 issue of Scarlet Magazine, here.