John Burrasca (1970–1998) was born in Florence, Italy, to an Italian father and a Jewish-American mother. He moved to the US to attend college at Penn, and became obsessed with erasure poetry during a course he took from Bob Perelman. (It was in that course that we met.) From then on, he wrote nothing but erasures, which he produced, or reduced, from nearly everything he read in the last decade of his life. He died in a single-car accident at the age of 27.