the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). In 1972, his first poetry collection, eccettera. E, was issued (Guanda). He became chair of Italian studies at New York University (NYU) in 1976, and in 1990, for a brief period, director of the Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò. This post led him to assume that of chair of Italian at UCLA in 1992. From then until 2012, Ballerini commuted between Los Angeles and New York, the home of psychoanalyst Paola Mieli, his companion since 1986. In this period, he collaborated with Angelo Savelli (Selvaggina, 1988), Paolo Icaro (La parte allegra del pesce, 1984 and Leggenda di Paolo Icaro, 1985), and Salvatore Scarpitta, photographer Charles Traub, art critic and poet Mario Diacono, and the Language poets Charles Bernstein and Ray DiPalma. He met and collaborated with critic and writer Marjorie Perloff, poet and translator Paul Vangelisti, sculptor Richard Nonas, and composer Jed Distler, for whose opera, Tools, Ballerini wrote the libretto. During these years, he was the promoter of Italian poetry and culture in exhibits (Italian Visual Poetry 1912-1972 at the Finch Museum of New York and the Turin Civic Gallery and Spelt from Sybil's Leaves at the Power Gallery of Sydney), and at conferences and meetings (The Disappearing Pheasant I in New York in 1991 and, in Los Angeles, The Disappearing Pheasant II in 1994 and La lotta con Proteo in 1997). Poetry and Poetics Sixteen years after publication of eccetera. E (republished by Edizioni Diaforia of Viareggio with an introductory essay by Cecilia Bello Minciacchi and contributions by Remo Bodei, Giulia Niccolai, and Adriano Spatola), Ballerini wrote Che figurato muore (All'insegna del pesce d'oro imprint of publisher Vanni Scheiwiller), followed by Che oror l'orient (Lubrina, 1991), a collection of Milanese poems and translation into Milanese dialect of the thirteenth-century poems of Guido Cavalcanti, for which he won the . The subsequent collection, Il terzo gode, was published in 1994. Shakespearian Rags, published in 1996 by Roman publisher Quasar, was written in English with facing text translated into Italian by the author (Stracci shakesperiani), with an introduction by Filippo Bettini. This was followed by Uno monta la luna (Manni, 2001) and his best known work, Cefalonia 1943-2001 (Mondadori, 2005), for which he won the Brancati Prize and the Lorenzo Montano Prize for Poetry. A complete collection of his poetry, edited by Beppe Cavatorta, was published in 2016 by Mondadori. Publisher