David Bottoms

Georgia Connections

• Canton, Cherokee County

Biography

Notes of Interest

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 from the Academy of American Poets. He is the author of nine other collections of poetry, two novels, and a book of essays and interviews. 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 was an emeritus professor at Georgia State University, and served as Poet Laureate of Georgia from 2000-2012.

David Bottoms is represented twice on the lists of "25 Books All Georgians Should Read:" Armored Hearts in 2002, and Waltzing Through the Endtime in 2008.

David Bottoms passed away on March 10, 2022, aged 73. A collection of new and selected poems, A Scrap in the Blessings Jar, was published posthumously. A Scrap in the Blessings Jar: New and Selected Poems was chosen by the Georgia Center for the Book as the official Georgia Adult Readers Selection for the Roadmap to Reading: Great Reads from Great Places at the 2024 National Book Festival.

Before his death, Bottoms’s poem, “A Walk to Sope Creek,” was included in the Spring edition of the "Georgia Poetry In The Parks" program, selected by Georgia Poet Laureate, Chelsea Rathburn and the Georgia Center for the Book.

Further Reading

Georgia Poetry In The Parks