A native of Alabama, Dennis Covington was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1995 for “Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia.”
In 1996 he won the Boston Book Review's Anne Rea Jewell Non-Fiction Prize.
Covington's work has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times Magazine, Vogue, Esquire, Redbook, the Georgia Review, and the Oxford American. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Alabama State Council on the Arts.
He has been a freelance journalist, notably reporting on the political conflicts in Central America during the 1980s. His most recent book, “Revelation: A Search for Faith in a Violent Religious World,” in 2016, came out of time spent in violent places, including Juarez, Mexico, and Syria.
He no longer teaching at Tech, but currently lives in Lubbock.