This chronicle of Davis's determined search for the true legacy of voudou in America reveals a spirit-world from New Orleans to Miami which will shatter long-held stereotypes about the religion and its role in our culture. The real-life dramas of the practitioners, true believers and skeptics of the voudou world also offer a radically different entree into a half-hidden, half-mythical South, and by extension into an alternate soul of America. Readers interested in the dynamic relationships between religion and society, and in the choices made by people caught in the flux of conflict, will be heartened by this unique story of survival and even renaissance of what may have been the most persecuted religion in American history. The tensions that have arisen between Cubans and African Americans over both the leadership and the belief system of the religion is discussed. Davis raises questions and offers insight into the nature of religion, American culture, and race relations.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Biography information: Rod Davis
Award-winning novelist and writer Rod Davis is the recipient of the fiction award in the inaugural PEN Southwest Book Awards in 2005 for Corina's Way (NewSouth Books, 2003). The novel is 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 second novel, "South, America," is forthcoming from NewSouth Books.
Davis also is author of American Voudou: Journey into a Hidden World (UNT Press, 1998, paperback, January 2000), a study of West African religion in the United States. It was 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, the annual anthology from Houghton-Mifflin. His PEN/Texas-award-winning essay, "The Fate of the Texas Writer," is included in Fifty Years of the Texas Observer (Trinity University Press, 2004).
An award-winning journalist and editor, his work has appeared in numerous publications including Southern Magazine, Boston Globe Magazine, Los Angeles Times, Playboy, Men's Journal, Texas Monthly, Destination Discovery, The Texas Observer, The Progressive, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Biography, Yankee, Coastal Living, Texas Parks & Wildlife, Old Farmer's Almanac, and Bon Appetit.
Davis served as executive editor at Cooking Light, a Time, Inc. magazine, and is a former editor of the critically acclaimed The Texas Observer and also a former editor of American Way, the magazine of American Airlines. He has been a senior editor at Houston City and D Magazine, a reporter for The Rocky Mountain News, and an editor at The Associated Press, as well as Associate Director of the Texas Film Commission and travel editor at the San Antonio Express-News. Formerly managing editor of the Teaching Tolerance project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, he is now director of the Veterans Support Office of The Texas A&M University System.
National professional honors range from a fellowship at the Yaddo colony to a Eugene V. Debs Award for investigative reporting to Gold and Silver Awards for feature writing from the City/Regional Magazine Association (CRMA).
He received an M.A. in Government from Louisiana State University and studied further at the University of Virginia before joining the Army in 1970, serving as a first lieutenant in South Korea. He has taught writing at the University of Texas at Austin and Southern Methodist University in Dallas. An eighth-generation Texan on his mother's side, he has lived most of his life in Texas and the South, and now resides in College Station.
