Caitlin Cacciatore is a transfer student at Hunter College. She is an Environmental Studies major and hopes to pursue a career in mycology, public science education, environmental advocacy, and ecological stewardship. Caitlin’s earned her B.A. in Artificial Intelligence Studies at Macaulay Honors College at Baruch and went on to earn an MA in Digital Humanities with a specialty in digital pedagogy. She is studying for her second Bachelor’s with the goal of graduating in 2027.

Caitlin is an award-winning poet and essayist from an ecologically vulnerable community called Arverne by the Sea. Subject to coastal flooding, beach erosion, the ever-present threat of hurricanes, dwindling biodiversity, seasonal pollution, and rising sea levels, her essay “The Memory of Calmer Seas” explores environmental and ecological disturbances and their human impact on the Rockaway Peninsula. It will be available on September 22nd in the anthology When Home Hurts, available on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/When-Home-Hurts-Solastagia-Nonfiction/dp/B0FP7K8D1D/.

“If the sea wall fails to hold the water at bay, yes, we will bear the brunt of the damage – we’ll suffer the greatest number of causalities, the highest amount of property and vehicular damages, and infrastructure failures, but who is to say the water will stop at our doorstep? Borders at a great enough distance are indistinguishable from fiction, and if we flood, you flood with us.”

Her essay, “Elegy for an Empty Womb” is the first entry in the Letters to Our Children anthology. Editors Lee Fearnside and Robin Stock describe “Caitlin Cacciatore’s gut-punch of an essay” as “a poetic lamentation on the environmental state of our world; a love letter to a child who will never be.” “Elegy for an Empty Womb” is an epistolary essay describing Cacciatore’s reasons for remaining a member of the Birth Strike Movement. It is both an apology and a vibrant ode to the author’s never-to-be-born daughter, Mariana.

“Mariana, I named you after the deepest trench of the darkest sea. You take your name from the lowest point in this world, because I buried you deep inside of me and I promise I won’t ever let you out. Are you not safer inside of me? Your unborn potential, slowly petering out like a candle that burns low. One day, sooner rather than later, my period of fertility will have run itself dry and I will be as barren as all the worlds hanging lifelessly in the sky.”

Letters to Our Children is available here: https://www.chimeraprojects.art/letters-to-our-children

Cacciatore is also involved as a scientist mentor at New York Academy of the Sciences Afterschool STEM Mentoring Program, an ongoing opportunity you can consider joining or sharing with a science educator you know: https://www.nyas.org/learning/school-community-programs/after-school-stem-mentoring-program/?tab=mentors.

If you would like to read more of her work, visit her author’s website at https://caitlincacciatore.wordpress.com/.

Published: October 1, 2025