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 has reported on violence against massage workers in Flushing; attacks on trans rights across Texas; resistance to police killings in Columbus, and the global movement for sex workers' rights. Her forthcoming book, A Woman Is Against the Law: Sex, Race, and the Limits of Justice in America (Little, Brown and Company), uses narrative journalism and original archival research to offer a feminist indictment of the criminal legal system, drawing on 150 years of women’s attempts to appeal to the law in search of safety, accountability, power, and freedom.