Mary E. Laur
Senior Project Editor
E-mail: mlaur@press.uchicago.edu
Subjects: Writing guides; regional reference; general reference
Series: Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing; History of Cartography
My current acquisitions focus is on guidebooks for writers, with a particular emphasis on creative writing fields (A Poet’s Guide to Poetry) and communication of scholarly ideas and research to nonspecialist readers (Writing Science in Plain English), as well as on regional reference books. Over the past decade I have helped develop new editions of our classic reference works for writers, The Chicago Manual of Style and Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, as well as such general interest works as The Encyclopedia of Chicago; The University of Chicago Spanish–English Dictionary; The Child: An Encyclopedic Companion; Terror and Wonder: Architecture in a Tumultuous Age; and The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples. My training as a historian (Northwestern University; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) and as a nonfiction writer (University of Chicago, among others) has shaped both my commitment and my approach to our reference books.
