He also authored a profile for Vogue of Violeta Chamorro, Nicaraguan president-elect and prominent critic of the Sandinista government. His dispatches from the civil war in El Salvador and other conflicts in the region appeared in the Scripps-Howard and Newhouse newspapers.

In 1978, the couple moved back to Alabama, where Dennis taught English at the University of Alabama at Birmingham until 2003.īeginning in 1983, Covington made the first of a dozen trips to Central America as a freelance journalist. The couple would have two daughters and Vicki would also write several novels set in Alabama. He married fellow Birmingham native and author Vicki Marsh in 1977. Covington taught English at Miles College from 1974 to 1976 and at the College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio, from 1976 to 1978. After leaving the military in 1972, he entered the Iowa Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, studying under acclaimed fiction writers Raymond Carver and John Cheever and earning a master of fine arts. Army and stationed at Fort Polk, Louisiana, as a court reporter. He earned a bachelor of arts in English from the University of Virginia in 1970 and after graduation was drafted in the U.S.

He has authored five books and been a freelance journalist, notably reporting on the political conflicts in Central America during the 1980s.Ĭovington was born in Birmingham, Jefferson County, on October 30, 1948, to Sam Scott Covington, a supervisor at Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company, and Ellaree Russell Covington, a homemaker and visual artist. Dennis Covington (1948- ) is an award-winning author from Alabama known for his ability to delve into his personal life and idiosyncratic native South in his work.

Salvation on sand mountain