David Bottoms

David Bottoms was born in 1949 in Canton, Georgia. His most recent work includes Waltzing through the Endtime (Copper Canyon Press, 2004), Vagrant Grace (1999), Armored Hearts: Selected and New Poems (1995) and the novel Easter Weekend (1990). His first collection, Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump (1980), was selected by Robert Penn Warren for the 1979 Walt Whitman Award.

His poems have appeared in many magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, The Kenyon Review, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Southern Review. He also serves as editor for Five Points literary magazine.

About Bottoms's work, the poet and novelist James Dickey said, "One cannot read him without being nerve-touched by his sardonic yet compassionate countryman's voice, his hunter's irony. Bottoms has come into American poetry quickly; his place is already high, and will be higher."

His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Levinson Prize, an Ingram-Merrill Award, an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.

Bottoms is currently the Poet Laureate of Georgia and holds the Amos Distinguished Chair in English Letters at Georgia State University.