Melissa Gira Grant is a journalist, author, and filmmaker.

She is a staff writer at The New Republic; the author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work (Verso); and the co-director of They Won't Call It Murder. She was a senior staff writer at The Appeal, as well as a contributing writer at the Village Voice and Pacific Standard. Currently, she is at work on a new book, A Woman Is Against the Law: Sex, Race, and the Limits of Justice in America (Little, Brown and Company)