By Melissa Coade -
Wicked, witty wordsmith Alison Whittaker is a queer feminist poet slaying every creative and legal domain she sets foot in. She speaks about her newest anthology Blakwork and the pursuit of justice for her mob.
There are few people who can successfully marry their great passions. But, at the tender age of 25, Alison Whittaker has it in the bag. On Twitter, the poet and law graduate describes herself as a “Gomeroi multitasker”. She is also a research fellow at the UTS Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research, and is unshakeably smart.
Three months after returning from Harvard Law School, where she obtained an LLM as a Fulbright Scholar in 2018, Blakwork was published. It is Whittaker’s second anthology of poems. The first book, Lemons in the Chicken Wire, was released in 2016 and is the product of an Indigenous writing fellowship offered by the State Library of Queensland.
Whittaker, who at the time had run out of scholarship money for her tertiary studies, confesses the appeal of the fellowship was mostly monetary. But the opportunity allowed her to develop her work in a more structured and proactive way. Now she slays poetry like nobody’s business.
