Colette Inez (June 3, 1931 – January 16, 2018) was an American poet and a faculty member at Columbia University’s Undergraduate Writing Program. She published ten poetry collections and won the

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

, Rockefeller Fellowship, and two National Endowment for the Arts (NEA Fellowships) and two Prizes and many other awards. Her memoir, ''The Secret of M. Dulong'', was released in 2008 by The University of Wisconsin Press.Colette Inez Profile and Works
Poets & Writers website.

Early life and education

Born on June 23, 1931 as the love child of a French scholar and a French-American priest in Brussels, Colette Inez spent her early years in a Belgian Catholic orphanage, arriving in America as a pretended orphan at age eight at the start of World War II. Her adolescence was spent under the foster care of an alcoholic and abusive family in

Long Island, New York Long Island is a densely populated island in the southeastern region of the U.S. state of New York, part of the New York metropolitan area. With over 8 million people, Long Island is the most populous island in the United States and the 18th ...

.Colette Inez
Poetry Foundation. She graduated from

Hunter College Hunter College is a public university in New York City. It is one of the constituent colleges of the City University of New York and offers studies in more than one hundred undergraduate and postgraduate fields across five schools. It also admi ...

Career

Her first book, ''The Woman Who Loved Worms'' (1972), was adapted into a dance performance by the Saeko Ichinohe Dance Company. Five of her poems were used as the lyrics of a song cycle, ''Miz Inez Sez'', featured on

Pulitzer Prize The Pulitzer Prize () is an award for achievements in newspaper, magazine, online journalism, literature, and musical composition within the United States. It was established in 1917 by provisions in the will of Joseph Pulitzer, who had made h ...

winning composer David Del Tredici’s album ''Secret Music'' (2002): "Alive and Taking Names," "The Happy Child," "Good News! Nilda is Back," and "Chateauneuf du Pape, the Pope's Valet Speaks" (all from her 1993 collection ''Getting Under Way: New and Selected Poems''), as well as "The Beckoning" (first published in the ''New Orleans Review'' in 1999). She has taught at Bucknell University, Ohio University, Denison University,

State University of New York The State University of New York (SUNY, , ) is a system of public colleges and universities in the State of New York. It is one of the largest comprehensive system of universities, colleges, and community colleges in the United States. Led by c ...

(Stony Brook),

, University of Tennessee (Knoxville), The New School and started teaching at Columbia University in 1983 starting the Columbia University School of General Studies and subsequently as a lecturer in the university's Undergraduate Writing Program. Colette continued writing and reciting poetry up until her death. She died on January 16, 2018.

Works

* ''The Woman Who Loved Worms'', Doubleday, 1972. * ''Alive and Taking Names''. Ohio University Press, 1977. * ''Eight Minutes from the Sun''. Saturday Press, 1983. * ''Family Life'', Story Line Press, 1992 * Colette Inez JeffersonMarket

''Getting Underway: New & Selected Poetry'', Story Line Press, 1993. * ''Naming the Moons''. Press of Appletree Alley, 1994. * ''Clemency', Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1998. * ''Spinoza Doesn't Come Here Anymore'', Melville House Publishing, 2004. . * ''The Secret of M. Dulong'', University of Wisconsin Press, 2005.
Excerpts
* ''For Reasons of Music''

Awards

* 1985:

All Fellows: Colette Inez- 1985- Creative Arts-Poetry

John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation was founded in 1925 by Olga and Simon Guggenheim in memory of their son, who died on April 26, 1922. The organization awards Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been ...

website.

References

External links

Colette Inez Page
at Columbia University
Colette Inez, Biography and Poems
at Poetry Foundation
The Poetry Worm: A Portrait of Colette Inez
by Dennis Bernstein at Tulane University

at Academy of American Poets {{DEFAULTSORT:Inez, Colette 1931 births 2018 deaths American memoirists Belgian emigrants to the United States Columbia University faculty Hunter College alumni Rockefeller Fellows National Endowment for the Arts Fellows American women poets American women memoirists