Description: The Reverend Corina Youngblood, powered by Jesus and the Santos, aids the religious and spiritual needs of New Orleans with voodoo, New Age, and old-fashioned capitalism, greed, and envy.
Brief description: Rod Davis is the recipient of the inaugural Fiction Award of the PEN Southwest Book Awards in 2005 for Corina's Way, described by Kirkus Reviews as "a spicy bouillabaisse, New Orleans-set, in the tradition of Flannery O'Connor or John Kennedy Toole: a welcome romp, told with traditional Southern charm." A member of the Texas Institute of Letters, Davis is also author of American Voudou: Journey into a Hidden World, selected as one of the "Exceptional Books of 1998" by Bookman Book Review Syndicate. A six-part series on the Texas-Mexico border, "A Rio Runs Through It," appears in Best American Travel Writing 2002. His PEN Texas-award-winning essay, "The Fate of the Texas Writer," is included in Fifty Years of the Texas Observer and his Texas Monthly story, "Wal-marts Across Texas," is excerpted in True Stories by David Byrne. Davis has received numerous awards as a magazine editor and writer. He earned an M.A. in Government at Louisiana State University and studied at the University of Virginia before joining the Army in 1970, serving as a first lieutenant in South Korea. He lives in Texas.