Douglas Trevor has been awarded the Balcones Fiction Prize for Girls I Know (Sixonseven Books), which final judge the acclaimed writer Carolyn Osborn called "a contemporary answer to meaningless violence and, at the same time, hope for a reasonable future."

The novel follows 29-year-old Walt Steadman—grad school dropout, sperm donor, and holder of other odd jobs— who survives a shooting in his favorite Boston café that leaves four people dead. He and a female writer and young African American girl must come to terms with their grief.

Osborn said, "These interwoven characters manage to help each other by accident, by luck, and by goodwill. Nothing is forced or fanciful. Resolutions are reached skillfully in clear prose leading a reader to see that rampant evil can be assuaged if not totally overcome. The writer is to be congratulated for his sensibly balanced point of view that allows his readers to understand people from different cultures, their griefs, their acceptances, and their means of survival."

Trevor is the author of short story collection The Thin Tear in the Fabric of Space, winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award and finalist for the 2006 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for First Fiction. He lives in Ann Arbor, where he is an Associate Professor of Renaissance Literature and Creative Writing in the English Department at the University of Michigan.