About Dorsey Price Salerno

Q.Where were you born?

A. I was born in Baltimore, the daughter of an Argentine mother and a father from Maryland.

Q. Who is "Robert" in your dedication?

A. Robert is my husband, a surgeon of Italian descent. Together we traveled to all of the cities and towns in my novel, The Bacchus Claim. In the past years we have made eight or ten trips to Italy.

Q. Where do you live?

A. I live in Westchester County, New York.

Q. What schools did you attend?

A. The Bryn Mawr School, in Baltimore, the University of Rochester-- with a B.A. degree in French and History -- and NYU with an M.A. in French. I also studied Latin at Columbia University and Fordham.

Q. What awards have you received?

A. I was the winner of a short story contest in Writer's Digest Magazine; I was awarded a scholarship for summer study in Latin at College of Wales, Great Britain.

Q. What articles and short stories have you published?

A. "The Power of Raising Your Voice" was published in The New York Times, as well as "A Latin Teacher's Three Gifts". The Johns Hopkins University Magazine published "That Particular Spring".  Several teaching magazines used "When the Candle is Lit," and "From the Alpha to the Omega." These are all creative stories.

Q. Have you written other books?

A. I wrote two books on how to teach Latin to beginning students. "Latin for Beginners" and "Latin in Motion" are both published by The American Classical League in Oxford, Ohio.

Q. What foreign languages do you speak?

A. French, Italian and Spanish. I taught Latin and French for ten years in the Chappaqua, New York schools, and I was an interpreter in Spanish for the pre-Natal Clinic at the Northern Westchester Medical Center in Mt. Kisco, New York.

Q. The Bacchus Claim is a thriller about reclaiming stolen art. What prompted you to write it?

A. Every novelist I know writes a story to answer a nagging question.

Q. What question did you want to answer?

A. I wanted to know what it was like to be forced to pretend to be someone you were not. Several years ago, when my husband and I were visiting the president of the University of Padua and his wife, we were invited to a dinner party near Venice. The subject of World War II came up, and how Jewish Italians had to hide from the Gestapo. My book grew from that conversation -- all of the major characters in the book have to hide who they are, in one way or another.

Q. Are there other reasons you wrote The Bacchus Claim?

A. Yes. High Schoolers in the United States study World War II 

for one week, two at the most. They are mostly very unknowing of this pivotal event of the Twentieth Century. I'd like them to learn more about it.