U.S. Poet Laureate, 1991-1992
Joseph Brodsky was born in Leningrad (present-day St. Petersburg), Russia, in 1940. He published nine collections of English-language poetry, including Selected Poems (1973), So Forth (1996), and Collected Poems in English (2000). He also published three essay collections, including Less Than One: Selected Essays, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Brodsky received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987, was appointed the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1991-92, and served as poet-in-residence at the University of Michigan for several years. He taught at Mount Holyoke College and Columbia, Yale, and Cambridge Universities, and was co-founder of the American Poetry & Literacy Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to making poetry more central to American culture. Joseph Brodsky died in 1996.
Audio Recordings with Joseph Brodsky
- Joseph Brodsky reading his poems in Russian in the Recording Laboratory, February 28, 1979
- Joseph Brodsky reading his poems in the Coolidge Auditorium, April 16, 1984
- Poet Laureate/Consultant in Poetry Joseph Brodsky delivering a lecture to open the 1991-92 literary season
- As part of Poetry in English at the Library of Congress, Joseph Brodsky reading his poetry on May 14, 1992