Douglas Trevor (born 1969) is an American author and academic. His first book was a collection of stories entitled The Thin Tear in the Fabric of Space (2005). This was followed by The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England (2004), the novel Girls I Know (2013), and the short story collection The Book of Wonders. He has won several awards for his writing. Since 2007 and , he teaches in the English Department of the University of Michigan.
Douglas Trevor was born 1969 in Pasadena, California. He moved with mother, father, and sister, Jolee, to Denver, Colorado at the age of three.
He attended high school at the Kent Denver School and from there went to Princeton University, where he studied Comparative Literature and Creative Writing. In the Princeton Creative Writing Program, Trevor worked with Joyce Carol Oates, Russell Banks, and Toni Morrison. He graduated in 1992.
Trevor went to France on a Rotary Fellowship to study the essayist Michel de Montaigne at the Université de Tours. After completing a year of study, he matriculated to Harvard University, where he began work on an English PhD, completing it in 1999.
After completing his PhD, Trevor took an assistant professorship in the English Department at the University of Iowa. He received tenure in 2005. While at Iowa, Trevor also served for a time as the fiction editor of The Iowa Review (2000âÂÂ2004).
In 2007 he took a tenured position at the University of Michigan, teaching in the English Department and Creative Writing Program. He was a former director of the Helen Zell Writers' Program.
In January 2021, The Michigan Daily published an article alleging that three female students at the University of Michigan had made complaints about him between 2017 and 2019, alleging harassment, retaliation, and intimidation. The University investigation found that Trevor was not guilty of sexual harassment.
, he is a professor at the University of Michigan, teaching courses on Shakespeare.
Trevor's first published work in a national distributed journal was in The Ontario Review, when he was 24. For the next decade, he published short stories in journals and magazines such as Glimmer Train, The Paris Review, Epoch (American magazine), The New England Review, and The Black Warrior Review.
In 2004, his first book appeared. The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England was a study of how writers such as John Donne, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton utilized the term melancholic to enhance their reputations as learned writers. In 2005, Trevor published his first collection of stories, The Thin Tear in the Fabric of Space. Each of these nine stories circles around a different experience of grief following the death of a loved one. The collection is dedicated to the writer's sister, Jolee, who died unexpectedly in 1998.
As a scholar of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature, Trevor has published widely on writers ranging from Thomas More to Milton, and was the co-editor (with Carla Mazzio) of Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture (2000).
Following the publication of Girls I Know, Trevor returned to short fiction, publishing several stories in journals such as Ploughshares Solos and The Iowa Review. In 2017, Trevor's second collection of stories, The Book of Wonders, appeared.
Trevor received the Iowa Short Fiction Award and was a finalist for the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for his first book, a collection of stories entitled The Thin Tear in the Fabric of Space (2005).
Other recognition and awards include:
The father of two, Trevor married in 2001 and divorced in 2010.