An Introduction

Okay, here's the short version: I'm an award-winning freelance journalist--words and photos--living in Austin, Texas, covering women's issues, food, crime and local politics. By night, I'm a stand-up comedian, cocktail enthusiast and crazy young cat lady.

Here's the long version: I've been writing non-stop since well before I graduated from New York University, class of '05, with an individualized B.A. in new media. At NYU, I interned for SPIN and Seventeen before beginning my professional career at the Dallas Observer as a New Times editorial fellow. Before my New Times fellowship was over, I 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, I covered true crime, religion and outsider communities, but most Dallasites know me best for being the woman who wrote that article about douchebags.

In 2007, I 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, I enrolled in the University of Texas at Austin's graduate cultural anthropology program, conducted fieldwork in Dallas, Austin and New York City and wrote my thesis on gender issues in stand-up. If you like wanky extrapolations about narrative discourse and gender performance in the small world of a niche hobby, I'd be happy to send you a copy.

Throughout graduate school and after, I continued to do 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 I 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 D Magazine, the Austin Chronicle, Salon, One+ and TRIBEZA.

Most recently, I'm freelancing and focusing on covering women's issues and gender justice when I'm not working as the editor of Eater Austin. You can also find me at Ms. Magazine, Jezebel, RH Reality Check and Hay Ladies! E-mail me at andrea dot grimes at gmail.