Colette Inez (1931-2018) published 10 collections of verse and a memoir. She was born in Belgium, spent the early part of her life in a convent and was sent to Long Island just before World War II. She earned a B.A. in English literature from Hunter College in 1961. Her first collection, The Woman Who Loved Worms (1972), won the Great Lakes Colleges Association National First Book Award and was reissued by Carnegie Mellon’s Classic Contemporary series in 1991. Her latest collections include Horseplay (2011) and The Luba Poems (2014). She is the author of the memoir The Secret of M. Dulong (2005), as well as the libretto for Mira J. Spektor’s opera Mary Shelley (renamed Villa Diodati), which premiered in 2003. Inez’s song cycle Miz Inez Sez, composed by Pulitzer Prize winning David del Tredici (18x 65-98), was produced as the album Secret Music (2002). The New Yorker said it “may be the best new-music album of the year.” She has won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, two awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, two Pushcart Prizes, and several other awards from the Poetry Society of America, where she served on the governing board 1979-80. She was also a noted teacher of writing. A former faculty member at Columbia University’s Writing Program, she taught at numerous other universities and colleges, and was sought after for many writers’ conferences.
Photo by Andrew Yee
