Martha Bayne is a Seattle-born, Chicago-based writer and editor whose features and essays have appeared in ​Time Out Chicago, The Chicago Tribune, The Chicago Sun-Times, Bookforum, The Washington Post, The Rumpus, The Baffler, and The Chicago Reader, where she was an editor and staff writer from 1998-2007. In 2009, Bayne started the Soup & Bread series of hunger-relief fundraisers at the Hideout, and in 2011 she published the Soup & Bread Cookbook: Building Community One Pot at a Time (Agate Publishing). 

Currently she is a senior editor at Belt magazine and co-edits, with Zoe Zolbrod, the Sunday page of The Rumpus. Bayne is also a company member with Theatre Oobleck, managing editor of Opera Quarterly, and the Wednesday afternoon bartender at the Hideout.