By Rosalind Bentley

Georgia has a new top poet.

Judson C. Mitcham has been appointed Georgia’s newest poet laureate on Friday by Gov. Nathan Deal. Mitcham, a professor of writing at Mercer University in Macon, has won some of the more prestigious writing honors in the nation including the Pushcart Prize for the best work published by small presses. He has twice won the Townsend Award for Fiction honoring Georgia’s best novels and he has written three collections of poetry, as well as held fellowships through the Georgia Council of the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.  The University of Georgia graduate has also been the psychology department chair at Fort Valley State University.

Mitcham succeeds the post after David Bottoms, who is the Amos Distinguished Chair of Poetry at Georgia State University. The poet laureate position is unpaid and largely a ceremonial position.