Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996) was born in Leningrad, USSR. In 1964 Soviet authorities convicted him of "social parasitism" and sentenced him to five years of hard labor in the Arkhangelsk region; international pressure secured his release in 1965. Expelled from the USSR in 1972, he settled in the United States and taught at the University of Michigan and Mount Holyoke College. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987 and served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1991 to 1992. His English-language collections include A Part of Speech (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980) and To Urania (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988).
