David Bottoms Obituary, American Poets Award Winner Has Died

David Bottoms Obituary, Death – The untimely demise of DAVID BOTTOMS has left us feeling incredibly sorrowful. Robert Penn Warren chose David Bottoms’ debut book, Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump, as the recipient of the Academy of American Poets’ 1979 Walt Whitman Award.

Numerous anthologies and textbooks, as well as journals like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Poetry, and The Paris Review, have published his poems. He also wrote two novels, two other poetry collections, and a book of essays and interviews. Otherworld, Underworld, Prayer Porch, his most current collection of poetry, was published by Copper Canyon in the spring of 2018.

His additional honors include grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, the Frederick Bock Prize and the Levinson Prize from Poetry magazine, an Ingram Merrill prize, and a literary prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. More than 250 schools and universities around the nation, as well as the Guggenheim Museum, the Library of Congress, and the American Academy in Rome, have hosted readings by him.

He has held positions as the Ferrol Sams Distinguished Writer at Mercer University, the Richard Hugo Poet-in-Residence at the University of Montana, and the Chaffee Visiting Writer at Johns Hopkins University. He holds the Amos Distinguished Chair in English Letters at Georgia State University and resides in Atlanta with his wife and children. David Bottoms: Critical Articles and Interviews, a book of articles on his work edited by William Walsh, was released in 2010. He was Georgia’s Poet Laureate for twelve years and was given the 2011 Governor’s Award for the Arts and Humanities by the Georgia Humanities Council.