Colette Inez

Colette Inez, the author of ten books of poetry, has been widely published, is represented in more than seventy anthologies and texts, and has read her work in over 150 colleges and universities nationwide. Her earliest, The Woman Who Loved Worms (Doubleday, 1972), won the Great Lakes Colleges Association National First Book Award and was reissued in the Classic Contemporary series of Carnegie Mellon University Press in 1991.

Her other titles include Alive and Taking Names (Ohio UP, 1977); Eight Minutes from the Sun (Saturday Press, 1983); Family Life (1988) and Getting Under Way: New & Selected Poetry (1993), both from Story Line Press; Naming the Moons (Bucknell University/Apple Alley Press, 1994); For Reasons of Music (Ion Books/Black Cedar Press, 1994); Clemency (Carnegie Mellon UP, 1998); and Spinoza Doesn’t Come Here Anymore (Melville House Books, 2004). An academic book about her work, The Way Home: On the Poetry of Colette Inez, published by Word Press, appeared in 2003, followed in 2005 by her memoir The Secret of M. Dulong, from the University of Wisconsin Press. Her latest collection, Horseplay (Word Press), will appear in late 2011.

Among her honors are fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation (1985), The Rockefeller Foundation (1980), two awards from the National Endowment for the Arts (1974, 1988), two Pushcart Prizes (1986, 1998), and several others from the Poetry Society of America on whose governing board she served during 1979-80. Inez also received a New York State CAPS fellowship in 1975, as well as a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in 1995, and is also known as an essayist, poetry reviewer, and contest judge.

Her poetry has appeared in hundreds of mass media and literary publications, and many hundreds of websites carry references to her books, poetry, stories, reviews, interviews, introductions, descriptive blurbs, awards, honors, teaching appointments, readings, etc.

Her libretto for the opera Mary Shelley (renamed Villa Diodati), with a score by Mira J. Spektor, was premiered in 2003, and her Miz Inez Sez song cycle, with music by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David del Tredici, was produced on the CD Secret Music, 2002; the music critic for The New Yorker praised the latter as perhaps “the best new-music album of the year.” A professional collection in her name has recently been installed at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center of Boston University.

While long on the faculty of Columbia University’s Writing Program, she also taught at Ohio, Cornell, Bucknell, Colgate, Denison universities, The New School, and at Hunter and Kalamazoo colleges. She has also held teaching positions at The Cooper Union, SUNY Stony Brook, the West Side YMCA, and adult education programs in New York University. Inez instructed and conducted seminars at many noted writers conferences such as Centrum, Naropa, Aspen, Hofstra, Antioch, SMU, and Cranbrook, and has appeared on public radio and TV.