Judith Barrington was born in Brighton, England and moved to the United States in 1976. Her prose books are: Lifesaving: A Memoir (winner of the Lambda Book Award and finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir), and Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art, used in numerous writing programs. Her poetry books are: Horses and the Human Soul, History and Geography, and Trying to be an Honest Woman. She was recently awarded the 2013 Gregory O'Donoghue Poetry Prize at the Cork Spring Poetry Festival in Ireland. A recent chapbook, Lost Lands, won the Robin Becker Chapbook Award. Other awards include the Andrés Berger Award for Creative Nonfiction, the Dulwich Festival International Poetry Contest, and the Stewart H. Holbrook Award for outstanding contributions to Oregon's literary life.

Her work has been included in many anthologies and literary journals, including Creative Nonfiction, Prairie Schooner, Americas Review, Poetry London, and The Chattahoochee Review.

Judith has served on the faculty of the low residency MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Alaska Anchorage, teaching memoir. She has taught at various universities and numerous writing workshops including the Port Townsend Writers' Conference, Split Rock, Fishtrap , the Ashland Writing Conference, the Hassayampa Writers' Conference, and The Flight of the Mind of which she was a co-founder.

In Europe, she has given readings at The Poetry School, the Barbican Centre, The South Bank and The Poetry Cafe, and taught through The Arvon Foundation . In 2012, she returned to the Almàssera Vella near Alicante, Spain, to teach a weeklong memoir workshop.