Otherworld, Underworld, Prayer Porch Tapa dura - 2018

David Bottoms grew up in Canton, Georgia, the only child of a funeral director and a registered nurse in a home that had only two books: a King James Bible and a book by preacher Billy Graham. In 1979, Bottoms' collection, Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump, won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, where judge Robert Penn Warren described Bottoms as, "a strong poet, and much of his strength emerges from the fact that he is temperamentally a realist." Bottoms has since published eight books of poetry, two novels, and a book of essays, and served as Poet Laureate of Georgia for 12 years (2000-2012). He has won numerous awards including fellowships from both the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation and won a Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation. He currently holds the Amos Distinguished Chair in English at Georgia State University.