AGE: 30-something
OCCUPATION: journalist
HOMETOWN: Fort Worth, Texas
LIVES IN: Streeterville

As the digital news editor for the books section of the Chicago Tribune and cohost of the Sunday afternoon radio show WGN Weekend with Alex and Amy on WGN 720, Amy Guth comes off as brainy with a dash of brash. “They wanted me [for the show] because I’m a raging smart-ass,” is how she puts it, grinning through cat’s-eye glasses as the tiny diamond on the left side of her nose gleams. When she sold her first novel in 2006, a “totally weird little book” titled Three Fallen Women, Guth got a tattoo of a typewriter on her shoulder. But the once-gypsyish Guth has also become a homebody in her thirties. The former chef likes to cook in her Streeterville condo and cozy up with her cat, Chairman Meow, whom she rescued from the side of a deserted road. “I was like, I don’t need a cat,” she remembers thinking. “Two days later I was more, ‘Who’s your mama, sugar?’ ”

 

 

Photograph: Maria Ponce