Douglas Trevor

I was born in Pasadena, California in 1969, but we left when I was three, in part because the pollution in the LA area exacerbated my asthma. We moved to Denver, and in a few short years the pollution there was almost as bad as it had been in LA. Nonetheless we stayed. I'm very fond of the Denver I remember as a child: great weather, I realize now in hindsight, and there was never too much going on. I think that forced me to try to entertain myself, which I did principally by reading and writing.

I wrote my first short story at the age of six and never stopped writing after that. In high school I heard that Princeton University had a great creative writing program so I applied there early decision and didn't even consider going anywhere else. I wanted to work with Joyce Carol Oates and I did. She was a great mentor--very frank and incredibly funny. Her jokes never quite declared themselves as such, so to laugh was always to take something of a risk, which made her classes captivating and intense. Joyce treated all of her students like grownups. If she didn't like a story she'd say so. If she wasn't sure what she thought, she'd say that too (but usually she was pretty sure). The other writing teachers I had at Princeton were similarly astounding: Russell Banks, Stuart Dybek, Toni Morrison, and the poet Lea Baechler. I spent a week at the Cumberland Valley Fiction Writing Conference in 1990 and worked with Madison Smartt Bell. I've picked over these various encounters my entire adult life because my instruction as a writer stopped more or less after college. I wasn't inclined to pursue an MFA degree--the workshop setting had always seemed a little claustrophobic to me--and I felt just as bookish as I did creative, so I decided to go into academia.

I had been a Comparative Literature / Creative Writing Major at Princeton, specializing in sixteenth-century, French Literature--really just the essays of Montaigne, which I found absolutely mesmerizing. After college, I used a Rotary Scholarship to go to France and study Montaigne at the University of Tours. That was a great year. I worked with a Montaigne scholar named Michel Simonin--terrifying but also very kind--and I wrote a ton: including a rough draft of the story "The River" to which I would return many years later.

After France I moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts to start a doctoral program in English Literature at Harvard. I spent six years at Harvard and I enjoyed just about all of them. The place struck me as an enormously intellectual one, unlike Princeton, which had always seemed a little like a finishing school to me. I had started to publish stories by the time I arrived at Harvard, first in The Ontario Review in 1994, then in River City and The Madison Review. In November of 1998 my sister, Jolee, died very unexpectedly and my life became for a time very dark and sad. It seemed to rain in Boston from the day of her death, November 17th, until I received my Ph.D. the following June. I accepted an assistant professorship in Renaissance Literature at the University of Iowa at that time, and moved to Iowa City in August of 1999. In 2005 I received tenure.

My publications fall on either side of the "creative" and the "academic" divide (that there is such a stark divide is, I think, undeniable and also very silly). My fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Glimmer Train, The New England Review, Epoch, The Notre Dame Review, Fugue, and other publications. In 2006 I won an O. Henry Award for my story "Girls I Know," which was also anthologized in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005. As an academic, my work has focused primarily on the early modern understanding of the passions, and the depiction of emotions in literary texts. I've written on a number of different writers, from Thomas More to John Donne to George Herbert, and published in journals such as Studies in English Literature, Shakespeare Studies, and The Sixteenth Century Journal. Recently I've focused my energies principally on the works of Shakespeare and Milton. I've been fortunate to receive some very generous grants in recent years, including from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Mellon Foundation.