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

[1] 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.

Five of her poems were used as the lyrics of a song cycle, Miz Inez Sez, featured on Pulitzer Prize winning composer David Del Tredici’s album Secret Music (2002):[2] "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).