Alison Whittaker – December 8 2019

Alison is an award-winning poet, essayist, activist and law researcher. A Gomeroi woman from Gunnedah and Tamworth, north-western New South Wales, she now lives in Sydney on Wangal land. Alison holds a BA (Comms), LLB (Hons I) and GCLP from the University of Technology, Sydney. In 2015, she was named the National Indigenous Law Student of the Year by the Federal Government and in 2017 she received a Fulbright Indigenous Postgraduate Scholarship to complete a Master of Laws (LLM) at Harvard, where she was named the Dean’s Scholar in Race, Gender and Criminal Law. Alison has worked in media law and women’s law and policy and has been a Research Fellow at the Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education & Research. As a poet and essayist, her work has appeared in the Sydney Review of Books, Seizure, Overland, Westerly, BuzzFeed, Griffith Review, the Lifted Brow, Meanjin and Archer. Alison was co-winner of the 2017 Judith Wright Poetry Prize for her poem, ‘Many Girls White Linen’, and has received a black&write! fellowship from the State Library of Queensland. She was the Australian Indigenous Poet-In-Residence for the 2018 Queensland Poetry Festival and has been commissioned for Red Room Poetry’s Poetry in First Languages in 2019.

BLAKWORK
Magabala Books, 2018; ISBN 9781925360851
A stunning mix of memoir, reportage, fiction, satire, and critique composed by a powerful new voice in poetry. Alison Whittaker’s BLAKWORK is an original and unapologetic collection from which two things emerge; an incomprehensible loss, and the poet’s fearless examination of the present. Whittaker is unsparing in the interrogation of familiar ideas – identifying and dissolving them with idiosyncratic imagery, layering them to form new connections, and reinterpreting what we know.
‘Whittaker’s syntactical interventions seek to commune with genocidal pasts and beyond while simultaneously calling ahead into the future …. in its own brilliant ways, this book is an act of war, its sounds and shapes acting as both chthonic echoes and epistemological landmarks …. Alison Whittaker is Australia’s most important recently emerged poet.’ – Dan Disney, World Literature Today

Lemons in the Chicken Wire [Novella in verse]
Magabala Books, 2016; ISBN 9781925360103
From a remarkable new voice in Indigenous writing comes this highly original collection of poems bristling with stunning imagery and gritty textures. At times sensual, always potent, Lemons in the Chicken Wire delivers a collage of work that reflects rural identity through a rich medley of techniques and forms. It is an audacious, lyrical and linguistically lemon flavoured poetry debut that possesses a rare edginess and seeks to challenge our imagination beyond the ordinary. Alison Whittaker demonstrates that borders, whether physical or imagined, are no match for our capacity for love.