Trevor Corson was born in Boston in 1969 and grew up in the suburbs of Washington D.C. He wrote his first book at the age of nine. It was bound with yarn and cardboard and told the story of a robotic belly-button cleaner gone berserk.
Trevor spent his boyhood summers with his grandparents on a small island off the Maine coast. “I became obsessed with sea life,” Trevor recalls, “probably because I spent too much time playing naked in tide pools.” At the age of five, he built his own lobster boat—out of cardboard. At 11, he dressed up for Halloween as a jellyfish. “I wanted to become both a marine biologist and a commercial fisherman,” Trevor says.
Of Quaker heritage, Trevor attended the Sidwell Friends School in Washington and there began studying Chinese language. Then, when he was sixteen, an exchange program offered through Sidwell by a Zen Buddhist temple in Tokyo lured him to Japan for a summer. He lived with a Japanese family. His homestay father treated him to his first full-fledged meal of sushi, at the neighborhood sushi bar. “I found it repulsive,” Trevor remembers.
Intrigued by East Asia, Trevor put his plans for marine science on hold. After high school Trevor was a recipient of the John Fisher Zeidman Memorial Chinese Studies Fellowship (the subject of a feature in The New Yorker by Calvin Trillin), which sent him to Beijing for two years, where he was among the first American college students to study in the People’s Republic of China. “I learned a lot about Chinese history and Taoist philosophy—probably too much. It was outside the classroom that I had my most interesting experiences. I encountered a variety of Chinese artists, filmmakers, and musicians—as well as a somewhat disreputable motorcycle gang. They were all down-to-earth people with great stories. So I started writing about them.” Trevor traveled within China, as well as to India and Nepal. He penned a series of journalistic dispatches that circulated widely among his friends and family back home.
In the spring of 1989, Trevor watched as his college campus in Beijing became a hotbed of student activism. He witnessed the Tiananmen Square democracy movement firsthand, and the subsequent military crackdown. The final installment of his China letters depicted his evacuation from Beijing after the army took control of the city.
Profoundly affected by his experiences abroad and by the tragedy of Tiananmen, Trevor delved deeper into his studies of Chinese language at Princeton University. He took up Japanese there as well, along with graduate-level coursework in African American studies. He majored in Asian religions and spent another year abroad, this time in Japan, at Stanford University’s Center for Japanese Language Studies in the port city of Yokohama. “When I wasn’t in class, I was hanging out with Buddhist priests,” Trevor says. “More often than not, a bottle of sake would appear, and I’d end up drinking with them. In the process I learned that Buddhism in Japan was a bit different from what most of us in the West thought it was—it was rather more complicated.”
Drinking with priests—and sometimes eating with them, too. “One priest in particular—a Zen master—had a favorite sushi bar he’d take me to,” Trevor recalls. “The chef knew the customers by name, and the food was outlandish and the variety of different fish unbelievable. I had to take a dictionary with me just to figure out what we were eating.” When he wasn’t imbibing with Buddhists, Trevor also worked in international Quaker peace education, facilitating exchanges between American teenagers and a Japanese survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
Trevor graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton, then returned to Japan once more, this time on a Japanese Ministry of Education Fellowship. He moved into a Buddhist temple in a working-class neighborhood of Tokyo and began studying for a master’s degree in Japanese religion. “A year and a half into it, I gradually realized that I wasn’t happy, and I had a revelation,” Trevor says. “Being a scholar wasn’t my nirvana. What gripped me most were the adventures I’d had outside the classroom, and the journalistic writing I’d done. I wanted to write for a general audience, not an academic one. And after five years abroad, I was homesick.”
Trevor cut short his academic career and moved from Tokyo to the island in Maine where he’d spent his boyhood summers. “I got a job as a commercial fisherman. My idea was that in the winter, when the seas were too rough to fish, I’d sit by the woodstove and write a novel.”
Fishing turned out to be a return to Trevor’s early interest in marine science. “The work on lobster boats was grueling, but it was also a whole new kind of education. The fishermen knew and respected the ocean, and every trap we hauled to the surface was a laboratory full of sea life.” Trevor is quick to point out that much of that life was tossed back unharmed—although not, of course, the lobsters that would fit on a dinner plate. On his days off, Trevor wrote his first full-length book, a memoir that he eventually tossed into the woodstove and burned. “It was terrible,” Trevor says. Instead, he started writing commentary pieces for local newspapers.
After two years of fishing, Trevor wangled an internship in the hallowed literary offices of The Atlantic Monthly magazine. He learned the journalistic ropes at The Atlantic, performing a range of editorial duties, from fact-checking to reading fiction. He also began to write for The Atlantic. Soon after beginning work at The Atlantic, Trevor also became executive editor of Harvard China Review, a magazine that featured leading historians, economists, and social scientists commenting on the changes underway in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
Trevor soon moved on to become managing editor of Transition, a quarterly journal that publishes unconventional essays, travelogues, interviews, and short stories from writers around the globe, often with themes relating to ethnicity and cross-cultural identity. The New York Times has called Transition a “high-IQ, multicultural Wired” and The Nation called it “tremendously impressive.” During Trevor’s three-year tenure as managing editor, Transition won the Alternative Press Award for international reporting three times and was nominated for a National Magazine Award in general excellence. Trevor wrote for Transition as well.
Eventually Trevor returned to the subject of lobster fishing. He wrote a centerpiece article on the Maine fishery for The Atlantic; the piece was subsequently included in the Best American Science Writing anthology. The article led to Trevor’s first book, The Secret Life of Lobsters: How Fishermen and Scientists Are Unraveling the Mysteries of Our Favorite Crustacean (HarperCollins 2004). The book was named a best nature book of the year by USA Today and Discover and a best book of the year by Time Out New York; it was also selected by Barnes & Noble for its Discover Great New Writers Program. The Secret Life of Lobsters became a worldwide bestseller in the popular-science category. Trevor has a theory for why the book remains so popular: “I think it’s all the sex and violence.” With the success of the book Trevor was in great demand as a speaker, and he continues to perform a variety of public presentations that teach about marine biology and conservation in a style that is both funny and educational.
In the meantime, Trevor had continued to write about East Asia. Contemplating a second book, he searched for a way to combine his disparate interests in East Asia and marine science. “I thought back to those amazing sushi meals in Japan,” Trevor says. It wasn’t long before he was logging 12-hour days at the California Sushi Academy in Los Angeles, following a group of aspiring chefs who would become the real-life characters in his book, The Story of Sushi: An Unlikely Saga of Raw Fish and Rice (HarperCollins 2007; the first edition was originally titled The Zen of Fish). “Drinking sake with the sushi chefs was part of the job,” Trevor says. “It’s something I was well prepared for, thanks to my training in Japan with Buddhist priests.” The Story of Sushi was selected as an Editors’ Choice by the New York Times Book Review, won “Best American Food Literature Book” of 2007 in the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards, and was selected as a best food book of the year by the Zagat Survey. After the publication of the book, Trevor began to offer his sushi expertise through his innovative “Sushi Concierge” service.
As a newspaper and magazine writer, Trevor has covered a wide variety of subjects, including food ethics, hybrid cars, military affairs, organ transplants, Japanese Buddhism, and Chinese politics for publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, Boston Magazine, and Gastronomica. (See the archive of some of Trevor’s published articles.) In 2005, Trevor was a Knight Foundation Boot-Camp Fellow at M.I.T. in investigative science journalism, and in 2008, a Visiting Writer at the University of Memphis M.F.A. program. “I’ve been something of a maverick with my life,” Trevor says, “and have had a rather far-flung set of experiences, following my interests wherever they lead. It’s an unsettled existence, but the payoff is that I get to take readers places they might not otherwise go.”
Trevor and his work have been featured on CBS Sunday Morning, ABC World News with Charles Gibson, NPR’s All Things Considered and Talk of the Nation, and numerous local television and radio programs. He has served as a judge on the Food Network’s hit TV show Iron Chef America, and is a frequent public speaker.
Trevor’s hobbies include pounding his fists on the bar at performances of Celtic folk music, making old-fashioned miso soup, and traveling periodically to Finland to confront his nemesis, “Louhi, the Old Hag of the North,” a 250ºF smoke sauna. Other facts about Trevor include his Federal certification in Level-Two Whale Disentanglement Network protocols for large marine mammals accidentally tangled in fishing gear.
Back to top
