Bottoms' first book, Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump, was selected by Robert Penn Warren as winner of the 1979 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets.
He was the author of eight other books of poetry, In a U-Haul North of Damascus, Under the Vulture-Tree, Armored Hearts: Selected and New Poems, Vagrant Grace, Oglethorpe's Dream, Waltzing Through the Endtime, and We Almost Disappear as well as two novels, Any Cold Jordan and Easter Weekend.
Bottoms gave over 200 readings in colleges and universities across the United States, as well as the Guggenheim Museum, the Library of Congress, and The American Academy in Rome.
He was interviewed on several regional and national radio and television programs, including two interviews on National Public Radio, and was featured in a half-hour segment of The Southern Voice, a five-part television miniseries profiling Southern writers.
[1] He was a Richard Hugo Poet-in-Residence at the University of Montana and held the John B. and Elena Diaz-Amos Distinguished Chair in English Letters at Georgia State University in Atlanta, where he co-edited Five Points: A Journal of Art and Literature and taught creative writing.