Poetry. Bottoms has a breathtaking ability to capture human tenderness, vulnerability, and cruelty in the brief turn of a line. His poems, set primarily in the American South, witness people in their moments of failure, as their fantasies and families collapse around them. Like Faulkner and Dickey, Bottoms blurs the distinction between good and evil, while exploring the violent underbelly of our national history.

Author City: MARIETTA, GA USA

David Bottoms has served as Georgia's Poet Laureate since 2000, and was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2009. He teaches at Georgia State University, co- edits Five Points magazine, and lives in Marietta, Georgia. His first book, Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump, won the Walt Whitman Award. Since, he has received such awards as the Ingram Merrill Award, Poetry magazine's Levinson Prize, the 1999 Georgia Author of the Year Award from the Georgia Writers Association, the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Additionally, he has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.