David Bottoms's first book, Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump, won the Walt Whitman Award. He is the author of six other books of poetry and two novels. Among his many other awards are the Levinson and the Frederick Bock Prizes of Poetry, 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. He is Poet Laureate of Georgia.

Praise for David Bottoms:

"An exquisite story-teller... Bottoms makes astounding leaps of both faith and doubt, and does so with insight, honesty, and flashes of anger. Bottoms' recipe for making a poetry so original and vital begins by combining historical dimensions and contemporary perspective, adds suffering and a twist of forgiveness, plus some family secrets and moments of exultation thrown in for good measure. Above all, there are his unflinching sensibility to extract blessing from the degradations of daily life and his dynamic narrative skills."
—The Southern Review

"Bottoms' new poems are powerful. With his superb Southern tuning, his compressed or 'spring' narratives, as well as his need for spiritual clarity... he has become more inward, a typologist who hunts now more for meaning than survival. Bottoms has deepened his portrayal of the South beyond alligators and country fairs to a place of genuine spiritual anxiety."
—The Kenyon Review