Alison J Barton is a Wiradjuri poet based in Melbourne. Her work is widely published in Australian and international journals and anthologies. She holds a Bachelor of Arts: Professional Writing & Editing, Master of Social Work and Postgraduate Diploma in Gender Studies (Arts: Research), among other qualifications. Themes of race relations, colonisation, Aboriginal-Australian history and psychoanalytic theory are central to her poetry.

Since 2022, Alison has won numerous Australian and international fellowships and residencies (including with the national writer’s house of Australia, Varuna House), and her work appeared twice in Best of Australian Poems. In 2023, she was the inaugural University of Cambridge First Nations Writer-in-Residence Fellow where she began research on her second collection of poetry. She spent two subsequent months in Berlin writing working on the same project. She used her place in residence at Bundanon in 2025 to continue work on the collection.

Alison featured as the on-stage poet for the live recording of the podcast, The Guilty Feminist, on its 2024 Australian/NZ Tour (Sydney and Melbourne). She has undertaken speaking engagements including poetry readings, guest lecturing posts, conference papers and poetry workshop facilitation in London, Cambridge, Paris, Berlin, Canterbury and Melbourne. She headlined the 2024 Daylesford Words in Winter Festival and featured at the 2024 Melbourne Emerging Writers Festival. Alison has discussed her poetry and other subjects on numerous podcasts and radio shows (Poetry Says and 3CR Melbourne Radio’s Spoken Word program and She Says).

Alison is co-editor of a forthcoming anthology on Indigenous Research Methodologies and is Editor-in-Chief of The Suburban Review. In 2023 Alison co-judged the Venie Holmgren Environmentala Poetry Prize. 

Her first collection of poetry, Not Telling, is out now with Puncher & Wattmann.