Prose-poet, critic, and scholar.
A recipient of multiple awards (including national and international teaching awards and research grants, including the Felix Meyer scholarship in 2004 -- she subsequently journeyed to Japan to write a novel based around the 'floating world'), Atherton has held lectureships at The University of Melbourne, The University of Western Sydney and Deakin University, lecturing in Australian literature, poetry, literary classics, popular culture, Romanticism, Modernism and creative writing. She was was a Visiting Fellow in the Institute of Comparative Culture at Sophia University, Tokyo in 2014 and is an affiliate of the Monash Japanese Studies Centre, and has been Visiting Scholar in English at Harvard University. In 2018, she was associate professor in Literary Studies and Creative Writing at Deakin University.
Atherton published three chapbooks of poetry, on each in 2015, 2016, and 2017, and a collection of prose-poems in 2015. Her critical works include editing Travelling without Gods: A Chris Wallace-Crabbe Companion and Flashing Eyes and Floating Hair: A Reading of Gwen Harwood's Pseudonymous Poetry.
