Poet David Bottoms was born in Canton, Georgia, in 1949. His first book, Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump, was
selected 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 Paris Review, and Poetry, as well as in over four dozen anthologies
and textbooks. He is the author of five other books of poems, In a U-Haul North of Damascus, Under the Vulture-Tree, Armored Hearts:
Selected and New Poems, Vagrant Grace, and Waltzing through the Endtime, as well as two novels, Any Cold Jordan and Easter Weekend.
Among Bottoms’ many other awards are the Levinson and the Frederick Bock prizes from Poetry magazine, an Ingram Merrill Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He holds the Amos Distinguished Chair in English Letters at Georgia State University, where he edits the literary journal Five Points. In 2000, Governor Roy Barnes appointed him Poet Laureate of Georgia.
Bottoms is Welsh on his father’s side and Irish on his mother’s. He is a lifelong admirer of Irish literature, and he has been greatly influenced by the poetry and thought of W. B. Yeats.
Among Bottoms’ many other awards are the Levinson and the Frederick Bock prizes from Poetry magazine, an Ingram Merrill Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He holds the Amos Distinguished Chair in English Letters at Georgia State University, where he edits the literary journal Five Points. In 2000, Governor Roy Barnes appointed him Poet Laureate of Georgia.
Bottoms is Welsh on his father’s side and Irish on his mother’s. He is a lifelong admirer of Irish literature, and he has been greatly influenced by the poetry and thought of W. B. Yeats.