Award-winning author Rod Davis’s latest novel, The Life of Kim and the Behavior of Men: Human Bondage in the After-market of War, (Madville Publishing, 2024) has been described as “a rare find of a novel that reveals the truths of the lives of American soldiers stationed in Korea during the Vietnam War era with gritty realism, authenticity, and compassion.” And as “Thoughtful, with dark, more-than-entertaining humor and a good, sad ending. This is a better read than Catch-22.”
Davis is the recipient of the Fiction Award in the Inaugural 2000-2005 PEN/Southwest Book Awards 2005 for Corina’s Way (NewSouth Books, 2003). Kirkus Reviews calls the debut novel “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.”
Davis’s second novel, South, America (NewSouth Books, 2014), received strong critical praise as “a triumph of Southern noir,” that “brings to mind the Dave Robicheaux novels of James Lee Burke” and that on Southern history and its persistent burdens on the present.”
The sequel, East of Texas, West of Hell (NewSouth Books, 2020), is labeled by Publishers Weekly as a “crime powerhouse—a maelstrom of meth dealing, human trafficking, and white supremacy….The hardscrabble prose sets the perfect tone, and the characters are reliably complex. Davis is a great guide through gritty Southern territory.”
He also is author of American Voudou: Journey into a Hidden World (UNT Press, 1998; paperback, 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 The Best American Travel Writing 2002, the annual anthology from Houghton-Mifflin. “Her Dark Places,” on the life and death of writer Kathryn Marshall, was included in Notable Essays and Literary Nonfiction of 2015 in The Best American Essays 2016. 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), and his Texas Monthly story, “Wal-Marts Across Texas,” is included in True Stories by David Byrne.
He served on the Board of Directors of the National Book Critics Circle, and is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters and of PEN America.
National professional honors have included a fellowship at the Yaddo Colony, a Eugene V. Debs Award for investigative reporting, a Lowell Thomas Award (Bronze) for personal commentary on post-Katrina New Orleans, and Gold and Silver Awards for feature writing from the City/Regional Magazine Association (CRMA).
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, Bon Appetit, and Salvation South.
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 former 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 launched and directed The Texas A&M University System’s first Veterans Support Office.
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.