page_title: Norbert Blei
section_title: Biography
hierarchical_section_title: Norbert Blei / Biography
caption_attribution_description: English: cover of Chi Town, a 2009 book from Norbert Blei's "Chicago Trilogy"
context_page_description: Norbert Blei was an American writer of non-fiction, fiction, and poetry. In 1994, he established Cross+Roads Press, dedicated to the publication of first chapbooks by poets, short story writers, novelists and artists.
context_section_description: Blei was born in an ethnic (primarily Czechoslovakian) neighborhood of western Chicago, Illinois known as Little Village. An only child, Blei and his parents moved to the near-western Chicago suburb of Cicero when he was in grade school.
  Blei attended Illinois State University, studying English, and graduated in 1956. He taught high school English and subsequently worked at the City News Bureau of Chicago as a reporter. In 1969, Blei left Chicago and moved to Door County, Wisconsin, a rural vacation destination for Midwesterners on the Door Peninsula in Lake Michigan. For four decades, he worked in a converted chicken coop in Ellison Bay, Wisconsin.
  Blei's first book was The Hour of the Sunshine Now: Short Stories by Norbert Blei, published in 1978.
  Blei was an early adopter of the Internet as a means to distribute his own work and call attention to other writers. His Poetry Dispatch was a weekly enewsletter that featured a short selection of poems by a single, noteworthy poet, while Notes from the Underground was an irregular email that featured brief essays on current topics, literary and otherwise.
caption: CHI TOWN (1990)
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