Melissa Gira Grant


Melissa Gira Grant is an American freelance journalist. She is author of Playing the Whore, the extended essay Take This Book and co-editor of the ebook Coming and Crying

Early life

Melissa Gira Grant was born in Boston, Massachusetts. She attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst and at San Francisco State University.
Grant is a former sex worker who began sex work to pay for being a writer.
Grant was a member of the Exotic Dancers Union and a board member at the Lusty Lady Theater in San Francisco. Grant worked at St. James Infirmary Clinic in San Francisco from 2006 to 2009. Later she was on the staff of Third Wave Foundation, a social justice and feminist foundation in New York.

Work

Melissa Gira Grant is a writer covering the intersection of sex, politics, and technology. She is the author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work published by Verso.
Grant is a contributing writer for Pacific Standard and the Village Voice. Grant has written for the Nation, the Atlantic, Wired, the Guardian, Reason, Glamour, Slate, Jezebel, Rhizome, AlterNet, In These Times, and $pread. She was previously a reporter at Valleywag. at contributing editor at Jacobin.

Publications