Melissa Gira Grant is a staff writer covering justice at The New Republic. She is the author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work (Verso). She was a senior staff writer at The Appeal, as well as a contributing writer at the Village Voice and Pacific Standard. Her feature reporting has been published by BuzzFeed News and the Guardian, and her commentary and criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Bookforum and The New York Review of Books. Her essays are collected in Best Sex Writing, The Feminist Utopia Project, and Where Freedom Starts: Sex Power Violence #MeToo. She lives in New York.