Dennis Covington

Who is Dennis Covington?

Dennis Covington 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 and Vogue.

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.

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.