Georgia Poet Laureate David Bottoms will read from his work at 7 p.m. Thursday, March 11, in the auditorium of the Huntington Museum of Art.

Bottoms is the author of seven collections of poems, including the Walt Whitman Award-winning Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump, praised by Robert Penn Warren as having “a vision [in which] the actual world is not transformed, but illuminated.” Recent books include his selected poems, Armored Hearts, and Waltzing Through the Endtime.

He has earned fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Among his other awards are the Levinson and Frederick Bock Prizes of Poetry magazine, an Ingram Merrill Award, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

As a Southern writer, Bottoms’ style is both narrative and contemplative, possessed of what James Dickey has called a “sardonic yet compassionate countryman’s voice.” His poems explore both our natural and human-created landscapes, uncovering the history of a place in the collective memory of its people. He holds the Amos Distinguished Chair in English Letters at Georgia State University.

Bottoms’ appearance is a featured presentation of the Visiting Writers Series, sponsored by the Marshall University English Department and the College of Liberal Arts. It is free and open to the public.