Joseph Brodsky

Joseph Brodsky (Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky) was a Russian-born poet and essayist born in Leningrad in 1940, who began writing poetry at eighteen and was recognized by Anna Akhmatova as a leading voice of his generation. Exiled from the Soviet Union in 1972 after a sentence for 'social parasitism,' he settled in the United States, taught at universities including Mount Holyoke, Yale, and Columbia, and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987. He served as U.S. Poet Laureate from 1991-1992 and authored numerous poetry collections and essays until his death in 1996.[1][4][5]