Doug Underwood

Doug Underwood is a widely regarded scholar on the impact of trauma upon literary figures in history. His pioneering work, Chronicling Trauma: Journalists and Writers on Violence and Loss (2011), examines the influence of sexual abuse and other traumatic events in the lives and literature of important journalist-literary figures – many of them women.

Inspired by Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urberville’s, Underwood has created what he has studied: namely an historical fiction novel, Always, Tessie, about a 1960s version, #MeToo movement story of a high school age girl trying to heal from a sexually abusive past.

"What makes this book so profound was ... Tessie's part of the story, especially when we see her go from a confused girl, now a woman, who can reach back in time and name what happened to her," wrote reviewer Demetria Head in Reader Views.

Before teaching creative nonfiction writing at the University of Washington, he was a political and investigative journalist at The Seattle Times, the Washington D.C. bureau of the Gannett News Service, and the Lansing (Mich.) State Journal. A native of the Pacific Northwest, he grew up in the Portland area and resides in Seattle.