Staff Writer

Kristen Marcinek was drawn to anthropology in high school, which led her to choose that as a major at Rutgers University. However, she is considering a change to Public Policy or Information Technology and Informatics. Kristen minors in Social Justice. After graduating in 2021, she wants to attend law school to specialize in international and public interest law. Her ultimate goal is to work in the field of international LGBT rights because she feels that international organizations could be much stronger in their support.

As the President of the Douglass Friends of the United Nations Population Fund, Kristen is active in fundraising and campaigning for global sexual and reproductive health and rights.

Kristen is also a freelance graphic designer, creating social media branding for clients that include YouTubers with over 10,000 subscribers. In 2018, she was an extern at the Center for Women and Work, Psicataway, N.J. That same year, Kristen was a Q & A panelist at the Anita Ashok Datar Lecture on Women’s Global Health in New Brunswick, N.J.

When she has some free time, she indulges in napping and playing video games.

Parasailing is not for the height-fearing, and that’s why Kristen labels it as the scariest thing she’s ever done. “While scary, I had a lot of fun and got to see the beautiful clear ocean that Florida boasts!” Kristen said.

Kristen realizes that it’s important for people to see themselves represented in the media, in print, and in their communities. This is one of the reasons she wanted to be part of Writing Wrongs 2019:

“In 2017, GLAAD found that only 4.8% of main characters in primetime television identified as being of the community. Not only is this unfair to the people who truly deserve to have their stories told, LGBT children and young adults are not seeing the representation they need to lead fulfilling lives. This lack of representation has personally affected me, as a member of the LGBT community. Without representation, I had no role models and no one to respect who could say that I could lead a happy and healthy life. I didn’t find an identity that felt comfortable to walk in for quite a long time due to not being exposed to many people who were different from one another. I believe it is imperative [that] members of my community get their stories told. Writing Wrongs would allow me to accomplish just this.”