Dr. 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 of the Academy of American Poets. His poems have appeared widely in magazines such as *The Atlantic*, *The New Yorker*, *Harper's*, *The New Republic*, *Poetry*, and *The Paris Review*, as well as in over four dozen anthologies and textbooks. Among his other awards are the Levinson Prize of *Poetry* magazine, an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Dr. Bottoms has given readings and conducted workshops at over 150 colleges as well as the Guggenheim Museum and the Library of Congress. Profiles appear in the *Dictionary of Literary Biography*, *Contemporary Literary Criticism*, *Contemporary Southern Writers* and *The Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry*. He has twice been interviewed on National Public Radio and is the subject of a half-hour segment of "The Southern Voice", a public television miniseries profiling southern writers. He is a founding coeditor of *Five Points*. In 2000, Govenor Roy Barnes appointed him Georgia Poet Laureate.