Career
His poems have appeared in magazines such as The Southern Review, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper"s, The Paris Review, and, as well as in over four dozen anthologies and textbooks. He is the author of seven other books of poetry,,, Armored Hearts: Selected and New Poems, Vagrant Grace,, Waltzing Through the Endtime, and We Almost Disappear as well as two novels, and Among his awards are the Levinson and the Frederick Bock prizes from Magazine, an Ingram Merrill Foundation 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.
Bottoms has given over 200 readings in colleges and universities across the United States, as well as the Guggenheim Museum, The Library of Congress, and The American Academy in Rome.
He has been interviewed on several regional and national radio and television programs, including two interviews on National Public Radio, and he is featured in a half-hour segment of The Southern Voice, a five-part television miniseries profiling Southern writers. Essays on and reviews of his work have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Southern Living, The Southern Review,, The Observer (London), and dozens of other newspapers and literary journals.
Profiles appear in a number of resource books, including The Dictionary of Literary, Contemporary Literary Criticism, and The Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century. In 2006, Bottoms was honored as a Star of the South by Irish America magazine.
Bottoms received his Bachelor of Arts from Mercer University and his Doctor of Philosophy from Florida State University.
He has been a Richard Hugo Poet-in-Residence at the University of Montana and currently holds the John B. and Elena Diaz-Amos Distinguished Chair in English Letters at Georgia State University in Atlanta, where he edits Five Points: A Journal of Art and Literature and teaches creative writing. He was Poet Laureate of Georgia 2000-2012.
