Humberto Ballesteros

Humberto Ballesteros is a fiction writer and Dante scholar. After obtaining a Ph.D. in Italian from Columbia in 2015 he remained at the University for an additional three years, teaching Literature Humanities as a Core Faculty Fellow. In 2018 he became an Assistant Professor at Hostos, one of the City University of New York’s community colleges, where he teaches Italian and Spanish and coordinates the Modern Languages Unit. The focus of his research is the philosophical underpinnings of Dante’s poetry. He is the commentator and main academic advisor for a new critical edition of the Commedia, translated by Professors Jerónimo Pizarro (Los Andes University) and Norman Valencia (Claremont McKenna College), the first volume of which won a grant for new independent editorial projects and was published in Bogotá in 2019. The second volume, “Purgatorio”, is currently in development, thanks to a grant from CUNY’s Professional Staff Congress. Parallel to his scholarly efforts, Ballesteros is an award-winning author in his native Spanish. His fiction has been translated into English, Italian and Portuguese. In 2010 he received the "Ciudad de Bogotá" National Award for "Razones para destruir una ciudad", in 2018 "Juego de memoria" was shortlisted for the Biblioteca de Narrativa Colombiana prize, and more recently his short story “A tree” was included in the London Magazine’s Special Colombian Edition, curated by Ella Windsor.