Martha Bayne

Martha Bayne is the editor of three acclaimed collections of writing about Chicago and the Midwest, most recently The Chicago Neighborhood Guidebook (Belt Publishing), named one of the ten best books about Chicago of the twenty-first century by Chicago magazine. Her reported work and essays have appeared in many local and national outlets including the Baffler, Eater, Oldster, the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Reader, PRI/The World, and the Rumpus, where she was for two years the Sunday essays co-editor. As a member of Theater Oobleck’s artistic ensemble, she has written work for solo and group performance, and she serves as a senior editor for South Side Weekly, a community newspaper by and for residents of the South Side of Chicago. Currently she is the regional trade editor at the University of Illinois Press and writes a regular newsletter called ‘Range of Motion’. She is the co-editor, alongside Sonya Huber, of Nothing Compares to You: What Sinead O’Connor Means to Us, a collection of essays which is published by Atria/One Signal in July 2025. Her own essay ‘Sunshower: “The Wolf Is Getting Married”’ is part of the collection.