His Cover’s Blown
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Preib, a Chicago native, has been on the force three and a half years. Prior to that he was a reporter for a small-town newspaper near Detroit, a college English and classics major, and, for nearly a decade, a hotel doorman and reformer in the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union. (You might have seen him outside the Allerton, or the Hyatt on Printers Row.) No matter what paid the bills, however, he’s always been a writer: he estimates that he’s written “thousands and thousands of pages,” mostly essays and mostly unpublished. He says he gave up on publishing a few years ago after spending three years on a piece about Walt Whitman and William Kennedy that editors praised but wouldn’t purchase (though it did inspire the Boston Book Review to hire him to do a Kennedy interview). “I just quit sending stuff around,” he says, adding that it’s an accident that this piece even appeared in print: it was passed by a friend of a friend to an editor at the VQR. Visit vqronline.org to see what stopped that editor in his tracks.
Reincarnated as a Woman
Miscellany
