The David Bottoms Prize for Poetry

Mercer University is pleased to announce the establishment of the David Bottoms Prize for Poetry. Named in honor of Mercer alumnus David Bottoms (CLA Class of 1971) who served as the Poet Laureate of Georgia from 2002 to 2012, the David Bottoms Poetry Prize will be awarded to the Mercer University undergraduate student who writes a poem that best exemplifies Bottoms’ belief that poetry is “a search for consequence.” A prize of $200 will go to the first-place poem, and one finalist will receive $50. The winning poet and finalist will also read their poems at the Third Thursday Reading in April, which will celebrate Bottoms’ poetry.

To enter, students may email up to three poems attached in a single Word-compatible document or pdf (no hyperlinks, please) not to exceed ten pages to Dr. Jim May at may_jd@mercer.edu with the email subject heading “David Bottoms Poetry Prize.” Entries will be judged anonymously by an external reader, so the students’ names or other identifiable information should not appear anywhere on the attached document. Students should list the titles of the poems in the body of the accompanying email. Submissions must be the writer’s original work and should be previously unpublished. The deadline for submissions is midnight on March 1, 2024.

Before submitting, students are encouraged to read David Bottoms’ work, which can be found online at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/david-bottoms or in the Tarver Library.

The April Third Thursday Reading will be held on April 18 at 6 p.m. in Connell Student Center 1 on the Macon campus.