Dr. Bottoms's first book, Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump, was chosen by Robert Penn Warren as winner of the 1979 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. His poems have appeared widely in magazines such as The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper's, The New Republic, Poetry, and The Paris Review, as well as in over four dozen anthologies and textbooks. Dr. Bottoms is the author of four other books of poems, In a U-Haul North of Damascus, Under the Vulture Tree, Armored Hearts: Selected and New Poems, and Vagrant Grace as well as two novels, Any Cold Jordan and Easter Weekend. He is also coeditor of The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets. Among his other awards are the Levinson Prize of Poetry magazine, an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Dr. Bottoms has given readings and conducted workshops at over 150 colleges as well as the Guggenheim Museum and the Library of Congress. His work has been praised in The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Observer (London), and many other newspapers and literary journals. Profiles appear in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Contemporary Literary Criticism, Contemporary Southern Writers and The Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry. He has twice been interviewed on National Public Radio and is the subject of a half-hour segment of The Southern Voice, a public television miniseries profiling Southern writers.

He is a founding coeditor of Five Points. In 2000, Govenor Roy Barnes appointed him Georgia Poet Laureate.

Recently, the State of Georgia launched the The New Georgia Encyclopedia, the first online state encyclopedia. You may read the entry on David Bottoms by clicking here.

Selected Publications:

Vagrant Grace. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 1999.

Armored Hearts: Selected and New Poems . Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 1995.

Easter Weekend. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990.

Under the Vulture-Tree. New York: William Morrow, 1987.