Alison Whittaker
Aboriginal Australian poet and academic
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Alison Whittaker is an Aboriginal Australian poet and academic of the Gomeroi people. She is a senior researcher at the University of Technology Sydney.[1]
Early life and education
Alison Whittaker's mother is Gomeroi and her father a non-Indigenous Australian.[2] She grew up on the floodplains of Gunnedah, near the Namoi River in New South Wales.[1]
She has a combined Bachelor of Arts in writing and cultural studies and a Bachelor of Laws (2016) from the University of Technology Sydney, and a Master of Laws from Harvard University (2018), where she was a Fulbright Scholar and was named the Dean's Scholar in Race, Gender and Criminal Law.[1][3]
Poetry
Whittaker's 2016 debut poetry collection Lemons in the Chicken Wire, which she has described as "a call to the humanity of Indigenous queer and trans mob."[4] For it she was awarded a black&write! fellowship from the State Library of Queensland,[5][6] which described the book as a "highly original collection of poems bristling with stunning imagery and gritty textures."[7]
Her second poetry collection, BlakWork (2018), won the 2019 Judith Wright Calanthe Award.[8] It has been described as a "discursively monumental collection [which] asserts unwavering pressure on the idea of 'Australia'," in "a voice seething with impatience, grief-stricken at the fate of this occupied place."[9] A review in World Literature Today called her "Australia's most important recently emerged poet."[9] A reviewer for the Sydney Review of Books said it was "a unique hybrid of poetry, memoir, reportage, legal documentation, fiction, non-fiction, satire, and social commentary [...] written from a Gomeroi, queer perspective."[10] Whittaker was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Indigenous Writing for Blakwork.[11]
Whittaker edited the 2020 collection Fire Front: First Nations Poetry and Power and presented a session of readings from it at the online 2020 Edinburgh International Book Festival.[12] A review in ArtsHub Australia said that it gave "insights from some of the most original and talented First Nations writers and thinkers in our country."[13] Writing in The Canberra Times, Geoff Page said that with one possible exception it was "the most ambitious attempt to update and/or replace" Kevin Gilbert's 1988 Inside Black Australia: An Anthology of Aboriginal Poetry, and that "the 53 poems in Fire Front do much to illustrate the variety of contemporary Aboriginal poetry in English."[14]
Research and writing
Whittaker's academic research interests include: Indigenous peoples and the law; critical legal and critical race studies; and First Nations deaths in custody. She has published a number of articles, chapters, and conference papers.[1] She has written several pieces for The Guardian.[15][16][17]
Selected publications
- —— (2016). Lemons in the Chicken Wire. Magabala Books. ISBN 9781925360103.
- —— (2018). "Aboriginemo". In Heiss, Anita (ed.). Growing up Aboriginal in Australia. Black Inc. ISBN 978-1-86395-981-0.
- —— (2018). BlakWork. Magabala Books. ISBN 9781925360851.
- ——, ed. (2020). Fire Front : First Nations Poetry and Power Today. University of Queensland Press. ISBN 9780702262722.