Melissa Gira Grant. American journalist and political activist. She is a criminal justice reporter for The Appeal and Author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work (Verso, 2014) (Translated and published in Spanish by Pólvora Editorial). She has contributed to the Village Voice and the Pacific Standard, as well as The Guardian, New York Times, BuzzFeed News, New York Review of Books, and The Nation, among others. Her essays are collected in Best Sex Writing, The Feminist Utopia Project, and Where Freedom Starts: Sex Power Violence #MeToo. She currently lives in New York.