Andrea Grimes is an award-winning freelance journalist (words and photos) living in Dallas, Texas. She covers women's issues, crime, and local politics. By night, she is a stand-up comedian, cocktail enthusiast, and crazy young cat lady. Andrea has been writing non-stop since well before she graduated from New York University (class of '05), with an individualized B.A. in new media. At NYU, she interned for SPIN and Seventeen before beginning her professional career at the Dallas Observer as a New Times editorial fellow. Before her New Times fellowship was over, she took a full-time staff position and later wrote a biweekly, ostensibly humorous, participatory journalism column for the Observer called Girl On Top. As a staff writer, Andrea covered true crime, religion, and outsider communities, but most Dallasites know her best for being the woman who wrote that article about douchebags. In 2007, she started performing stand-up comedy and became fascinated both by its practice and its gender politics. With an eye toward writing a book about female comics, Andrea enrolled in the University of Texas at Austin's graduate cultural anthropology program, conducted fieldwork in Dallas, Austin, and New York City and wrote her thesis on gender issues in stand-up. Throughout graduate school and after, Andrea continued in journalism, predominantly as the editor of Village Voice Media's women's issues and pop culture blog, Heartless Doll, and later as a staffer back at the Dallas Observer, where she wrote about the search for a missing woman on Facebook, the boondoggle that is the federal government's Operation Streamline immigration policy, and cruelty, cronyism, and mismanagement at the Dallas city animal shelter. I've also been published in the Austin Chronicle, Salon, One+, and TRIBEZA. Most recently, I'm freelancing and focusing on covering women's issues and gender justice. You can find her work at Jezebel, RH Reality Check, and Hay Ladies!