  We present a calculation of direct photon production at next-to-leading order
of QCD and a matching of this calculation with parton showers using POWHEG BOX.
Based on simulations with POWHEG+PYTHIA, we perform a detailed phenomenological
analysis of PHENIX data on prompt photon production and photon-hadron jet
correlations in pp collisions at RHIC, considerably improving the description
of these data with respect to previous calculations, and we suggest additional
interesting analyses.
