Gini Sikes is an author, producer, television writer and a print and broadcast journalist. Keenly focused on issues of youth, violence and the criminal justice system, Sikes has covered stories from homeless teenagers in the U.S. to genital mutilation in Africa for the Village Voice, Vibe, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Harper's Bazaar and others. She has investigated the impact of draconian drug laws on poor women, and explored the road to recovery for teen victims of school violence. Sikes’ book, 8 Ball Chicks: A Year in the Violent World Of Girl Gangsters (Doubleday/Anchor), chronicles a year she spent with female gang members—Latino, Black, White—in South Central Los Angeles, San Antonio, and Milwaukee. Readers discover the fear and desperate desire for respect and status that drive girls into gangs in the first place—and the dreams and ambitions that occasionally help them to escape the Catch-22 of their existence. Though non-fiction, the book reads as fast and furiously as fiction. In television, she produced and wrote several episodes of True Life, MTV’s documentary series. For a program on ecstasy (a co-production with 48 Hours), Sikes followed a girl who so abused the drug that doctors compared the damage to that of a 60-year-old stroke victim. For another show, she shadowed a 21-year-old prostitute and mother of three as she started her new job at a tiny legal brothel in Nevada. Sikes was nominated for a News Emmy for Where Were You At 22? which, through interviews and archival footage, looked at the lives of the 2000 presidential candidates when they were the age of MTV's viewers. She’s also created programming for Court TV, VH1, PBS, Discovery Health, and TLC. Well versed in a variety of media, Sikes helped create and to launch executionchronicles.org, a website that is monitoring a prisoner’s time on Texas’ death row. She was a senior editor at Mademoiselle and Metropolis magazines, and a radio journalist for Voice of America, reporting such stories as how war has changed life for young Iraqi women. She recently worked on Jesus Politics, a 90-minute feature documentary that explores the sometimes rocky relationship between faith and politics during the 2008 presidential primaries. Sikes has been recognized for her work with several honors, including receiving a 2000-01 Knight Fellowship at Stanford University. She is a graduate of Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.