Dennis Covington

Dennis Covington (born October 30, 1948) is an American author whose work includes two novels and three nonfiction books. His subject matter includes spirituality, the environment, and the South. Covington's book Salvation on Sand Mountain was a 1995 National Book Award finalist and his articles have been published in The New York Times, Vogue and Redbook.

Covington was born in Birmingham, Alabama, studied fiction writing and earned a BA degree from the University of Virginia, then served in the U.S. Army. He earned an MFA in the early 1970s from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, studying under Raymond Carver. He taught English at the College of Wooster. He married his second wife, writer Vicki Covington, in 1977. The couple returned to Birmingham the following year, and he began teaching at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. The couple divorced in 2005. They have two daughters and three grandchildren.

In 1983, Dennis Covington went to El Salvador as a freelance journalist. In 2003, he became Professor of Creative Writing at Texas Tech University. In 2005, he was a judge for the National Book Awards. Covington spoke at a talk hosted by the University of Central Florida's literary magazine The Cypress Dome in 2009.

In November 2017, Covington started his column called “Deep in the Heart,” published online by conservative magazine The American Spectator. He wrote a total of 20 mini-essays on life in Texas, family, lost love, health issues, and his childhood in Alabama. Covington’s essays were well-received.

Works

 * Lizard, New York: Delacorte Press, 1991. For younger readers.
 * Lasso the Moon, New York: Delacorte Press, 1995. For younger readers.
 * Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Salvation in Southern Appalachia, Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1995, ISBN 978-0-14-025458-7
 * Cleaving: The Story of a Marriage, (with Vicki Covington), New York: North Point Press, 1999.
 * Redneck Riviera: Armadillos, Outlaws, and the Demise of an American Dream, New York: Counterpoint, 2004.
 * Revelation: A Search for Faith in a Violent Religious World, New York: Little Brown & Company, 2016.

Criticism
"'Religion Kills,' Hitchens titles a chapter with typical bravado, as though science doesn't. The history of scientific inquiry is filled with examples of incompetence, chicanery and outright torture and homicide undertaken in the name of 'reason' and 'progress.' Yet Hitchens continues to imply that evil is the prefecture of religion rather than a resident of both secular and spiritual worlds."
 * Christopher Hitchens: God is Not Great, Dennis Covington, Paste Magazine, May 9, 2007

Excerpts in anthologies

 * From "Snake Handling and Redemption", The Art of Fact, Kevin Kerrane, Ben Yagoda, Simon and Schuster, 1998 ISBN 978-0-684-84630-9
 * From Salvation on Sand Mountain, The Oxford Book of the American South, Edward L. Ayers, Bradley C. Mittendorf, Oxford University Press US, 1997 ISBN 978-0-19-512493-4

Reviews
"Salvation On Sand Mountain details “war stories” of people who lived to tell of their poisonous snake bites, and of those who did not survive. Covington describes what led him to abandon snake handling during a wedding in Kingston, Georgia, where the writer discovered there’s a fine line in the world of snake-handling between faith and suicide."