Original Russian name Losip Aleksandrovich Brodsky.
Born May 24, 1940; died Jan 28, 1996.
Britannica –
“Russian–born American poet who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987 for his important lyric and elegiac poems.
Brodsky left school at age 15 and thereafter began to write poetry while working at a wide variety of jobs. He began to earn a reputation in the Leningrad literary scene, but his independent spirit and his irregular work record led to his being charged with “social parasitism” by the Soviet authorities, who sentenced him in 1964 to five years of hard labor. The sentence was commuted in 1965 after prominent Soviet literary figures protested it. Exiled from the Soviet Union in 1972, Brodsky lived thereafter in the United States, becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1977. He was a poet–in–residence intermittently at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, from 1972 to 1980 and was a visiting professor at other schools. He served as poet laureate of the United States in 1991–92.”
Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/80696/Joseph–Brodsky (accessed June 1, 2009)
“I am Jewish—a Russian poet and an English essayist.”
– Brodsky