Arlene Colombe Hiquily, is an American-born artist, poet and novelist originally from New York. Initially she studied watercolour painting with the German painter George Grosz at the Art Student's League in New York City in the late nineteen-forties. Inspired by authors such as Henry Milller and Djuna Barnes, she moved to Paris, France, in the early 1950’s and still lives there to this day nearly sixty years later.

The expatriate community was particularly active in the nineteen-fifties and sixties and Arlene met and became close friends with many writers, artists and musicians including (her former husband), the sculptor Phillipe Hiquily, Henry Miller and his wife Eve together with Allen Ginsberg - with whom she shared poetry readings. Other friends included the wonderful Beauford Delaney and Saheb Sarbib, the jazz musician.

In 1962 Henry Miller wrote to Arlene to say, 'I should long ago have acknowledged your beautiful book of poems – which I find better than many of our touted young Americans'. In a postcard mailed to her later he refers to the 'beauty and strength of her language'.