Cassandra Gillig is a writer, editor, curator, and public historian based between Kansas City and Chicago. Gillig is an MFA/MA creative non-fiction student at Northwestern University, where she is working on an abolitionist history of gay policing and studies LGBT print culture. For work on Leslie Feinberg, Gillig is the Bibliographic Society of America's 2026 Blahnk New Scholar and was a 2024 Phil Zwickler Fellow at Cornell University. Her work on TransSisters: The Journal of Transsexual Feminism is part of the An Era of Rights project based at the University of Missouri--Kansas City and received a 2025 KC Inspiration Grant to fund a forthcoming digital archive.

Gillig is a former co-organizer of microcinema and community space Stray Cat Film Center, where she programmed events with filmmakers like Shu-Lea Cheang, Lizzie Borden, and Elizabeth Purchell. Gillig was a 2022 Curatorial Fellow at the Poetry Project, which is also where she received her formative education in laying the poetic smackdown. 

Gillig is co-translator of Grenade in Mouth: Some Poems of Miyó Vestrini (Kenning Editions, 2019) and has a decade of experience as a book designer and editor, working especially with poetry, non-fiction, and arts writing. She works as the program coordinator for Trans Studies at the Commons, is a proud former Kansas public librarian, and has a background in community organizing and playing rock n roll music.