Dennis Covington (1949- )
Dennis Covington was born into a Scotch-Irish family in Birmingham, Alabama in
1949. He has lived most of his life in Birmingham and currently serves as the
Director of Creative Writing in the English Department at the University of Alabama-Birmingham.
Covington is an award-winning writer, though he did not become a published novelist
until 1991. He has also served as a professor of English at the College of Wooster
in Ohio, a free-lance journalist, and a journalist for The New York Times.
After frightful experiences covering the civil war in El Salvador
in the mid-1980s, Covington finally attempted to get his first novel published
towards the end
of the decade. This novel, Lizard, had been sitting under his bed for several
years until he submitted it for the Delacorte Prize, a competition for the
best young adult first novel. Covington won the prize and Lizard was
published in
1991. The book was given much praise and eventually Covington was asked to
adapt his novel for the theatre by the Alabama Shakespeare Festival (Contemporary
Authors).
This theatrical version of Covington’s novel was later selected and performed
at the Olympic Arts Festival during the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia
(Contemporary Authors Encycolpedia).
Covington’s best known work came in 1995 when he published Salvation
on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia.
This book was a work of non-fiction chronicling Covington’s involvement with snake-handling
churches in Alabama. In 1992 Covington was sent to Scottsboro, Alabama by the
New York Times to cover the attempted-murder trial of a snake-handling minister
named Glen Summerford. Influenced by his propensity
for risky activities and
his desire to learn about his family’s roots in the South, Covington
became deeply involved in the snake-handling religion and even handled poisonous
snakes
himself. Salvation on Sand Mountain is an account of these experiences and
takes a first-person look into the widely unknown Appalachian snake-handling
religion.
The book was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1995 and received attention
from several national media sources.
Covington’s other works include Lasso the Moon (1995), Cleaving: The Story of a Marriage (1999), and most recently Redneck Riviera (2004). He and his wife, Vicki (also a novelist), live and work in Birmingham, Alabama and have two daughters, Laura and Ashley.
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |