Greg Bottoms is a writer of memoirs, essays, and short stories, much of his work blending forms, experimenting with storytelling modes, and defying easy categorization. He is the author of a highly acclaimed memoir, "Angelhead: My Brother's Descent into Madness," which was an Esquire Magazine "Book of the Year" in 2000; two books of narrative essays about American, self-taught religious artists, "The Colorful Apocalypse: Journeys in Outsider Art" (2007) and "Spiritual American Trash: Portraits from the Margins of Art and Faith" (2013); and four volumes of autobiographical short stories set in Virginia, where he is from, "Sentimental, Heartbroken Rednecks" (2001; revised 2007), "Fight Scenes" (2008), "Swallowing the Past" (2011), and "Pitiful Criminals" (2014). His writing has focused on the South, the effects of violence on individual lives, mental illness, ecstatic and spiritual experience, creativity and art making, and social and economic class in America. It often blends explicitly autobiographical and biographical content with artful and original storytelling, a cultural journalist's observations, and a philosopher's deep inquiry into the strange ways we live now. His shorter works have appeared in many of the leading literary journals in the U.S., including Agni, The Believer, Creative Nonfiction, North American Review, Oxford American, River Teeth, Seattle Review, Shenandoah, Texas Review, Witness, and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing at the University of Vermont, where he is a Professor of English.