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Irina Ratushinskaya will forever be known as the poet who was arrested for her writing, sentenced to a Soviet prison camp, and who continued in the face of persecution to write new poems. She wrote them on bars of soap, memorized them, and then washed away the "evidence". In 1986, the 48th International PEN Congress called for her release which came on October 9, 1986, one day before the Reykjavik Summit. Her compelling story startled the world when in 1988 she published her memoir Grey is the Color of Hope (Hodder & Stroughton, London and Knopf, New York). After living abroad, Ratushinskaya and her family were allowed to move back to Moscow last year where she continues to write full-time. She is a recognized poet both in the international community and in the United States. Many of her new poems have the mark of a traveler: well-worn roads, melancholy good-byes, new friends, an eagerness for adventure, wind of the journey.