David+Bottoms

=David Bottoms=  David Bottoms was born on September 11, 1949 and was an only child. In 1967 he graduated from Cherokee High School then went to Mercer University and received his B.A. (Bachelor of Arts) in English in 1971. He married Margaret Lynn Bensel who was an art teacher at a elementary school. During that time, he enrolled into a graduate English program at the West Georgia College. Soon enough he received his M.A. for English in 1973 and from 1974 to 1978 he was a English teacher at a highschool and a part-time job was working with the Georgia Poets-in-the-Schools Program. His great writing skills started kicking in around 1979 when he was awarded with the Whitman Award which convinced him to resign his teaching position. In 1982 he got a graduate fellowship to State Florida University, where he accepted his Ph.D. in American poetry and creative writing. After his divorce with Margaret, he met Kelly Jean Beard at the University of Montana in 1989."Bottoms serves as the Associate Dean of Fine Arts and holds the John B. and Elena Diaz-Verson Amos Distinguished Chair in English Letters at GSU. "

//"One cannot read him without being nerve-touched by his sardonic yet compassionate countryman's voice, his hunter's irony. Bottoms has come into American poetry quickly; his place is already high, and will be higher."// - James Dickey Many of Bottom's items of his writings have received awards such as "the Levinson Prize from //Poetry// magazine, an Ingram Merrill Award, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters." His work is said to bring out the darker sides of human nature, using rats, vultures, snakes, and buzzards. One poem he wrote was called [|Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump]. When you read it, it gives off this feel of the South. It talks about beer and whiskey and shooting rats at night. The setting and overall outcome of the poem reminds you of something in the country with a bunch of men standing around laughing. [|Under the Vulture-Tree] is about vultures and the sighting of one. He talks about what they look like and what they do. 



 Sources: [|__http://www.pba.org/programming/programs/lexusleader/524/__] [|__http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-483__] [|__http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/32__] [|__http://www.newgeorgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-483__] http://www.poetryoutloud.org/poems/poet.html?id=716 http://www.poemhunter.com/david-bottoms/

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