Meet the Readers: Martha Bayne

Martha Bayne is a writer and editor in and around Chicago. Currently a senior acquisitions editor at the University of Illinois Press, she has worked in journalism and publishing for 30 years, since she first started publishing a zine in 1995, and recently returned to self-publishing with a Substack newsletter called Range of Motion. In between she has written a narrative cookbook, has edited three anthologies of nonfiction writing about Chicago and the Midwest, and her reported work and essays have been published in the Chicago Reader, the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Reporter, The Rumpus, The Baffler, PRI/The World, and other local and national outlets. Her new book Nothing Compares to You: What Sinéad O'Connor Means to Us, a collection of essays by women and nonbinary writers coedited with Sonya Huber, will be out in July 2025 from Atria/One Signal.

Please join Martha and our other fantastic readers on Tuesday, July 1, 2025 in the upstairs bar at Hopleaf. Doors open at 7pm, and the show starts at 7:30. It's free, and 21-and-over. Please RSVP on Facebook.