The spirit world of New Orleans incubates a volatile and offbeat mixture of religion, politics, race, and fate in this latter-day parable of the interaction of a man adrift in life and a woman rooted in her faith. As efforts by Corina Youngblood — Christian minister, voudou priestess, and botanica proprietor—to stop the construction by a former Cuban padrino of a SuperBotanica, a "Wal-Mart of spiritual supplies," begin to founder, she finds accidental alliance with Gus Houston, Acting Chaplain at a prominent girls’ prep school in the Garden District. Despite a calamity in the Gospel Tent at Jazzfest and a cost to her family, she emerges victorious in the struggle. Thanks go to her Jesus, and her santos, as they have all her life, for such is her way.
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.
