I connect readers and writers over good books.

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As founding editor of New Bay Times, I filled our independent paper with stories for 27 years, satisfying thousands of readers and publishing hundreds of writers. In my earlier career teaching writing in colleges and universities, I helped hundreds more writers find their voice and form.

 

As a book editor, I've wrestled dozens to publication. With New Bay Books, I continue a lifelong labor of love. Stories preserve our past, invent our future and give us new ways of seeing. After decades of telling other people's stories, I've now turned to memoir for my own writing.

I’m a survivor of decades of DC's toxic politics, with occasional forays to write about real toxics dumped on people from Alaskan native lands to South Africa’s KwaZulu province. I’m from Illinois, where roughly half of governors spend time in penitentiaries, a suitable training ground for becoming a St. Louis Post-Dispatch Washington correspondent and later bureau chief. Then came a stint as a Hearst Newspapers DC-based national investigative reporter, focusing toward the end on Texas, which I concluded is a foreign country.

 

I’m grateful for journalism awards that helped enable reporting from troubled lands, from Latin America to the Arabian Peninsula. I co-founded the family-owned New Bay Times-Bay Weekly business, wrote for magazines including Elle and finished two books along the way: Dinner at the New Gene Cafe, after chasing Monsanto and the corporate gene jockeys around the world (Amazon Top Ten nonfiction and Publishers Weekly Top 25); and Big Muddy Blues, chronicling the years-long battle over restoring the ornery Missouri River, presented through the eyes of characters along its banks. Both were published by St. Martin’s Thomas Dunne Books. More at williamlambrecht.com

The ancient species continues to visit the Chesapeake Bay every summer, mating and giving birth in the shallows. This ray is cute — and more. It recognizes the Chesapeake Bay region as an ecosystem reaching from the creeks of its vast watershed into the waters of the world. 

“There are many voices in our region, and we want to hear them and connect them with readers,” Sandra Olivetti Martin says.