Paul Salsini is a veteran Milwaukee journalist, having been a reporter, state editor and staff development director at The Milwaukee Journal. He now teaches writing courses in the Diederich College of Communication at Marquette University. He was the Wisconsin correspondent for The New York Times for twenty years and his travel essays have appeared in The Times and elsewhere.
He is the author of three historical novels that make up “A Tuscan Trilogy.” The Cielo: A Novel of Wartime Tuscany is the story of a group of villagers trapped in a farmhouse during WWII. The book received First Place in Fiction from the Council for Wisconsin Writers and from the Midwest Independent Publishers Association. Sparrow’s Revenge: A Novel of Postwar Tuscany describes a partisan’s relentless search for a collaborator of a Nazi massacre, and the just-published Dino’s Story: A Novel of 1960s Tuscany is about a boy who comes of age helping the poor and destitute during the devastating flood in Florence in 1966. He is the 2011 winner of the Sons of Italy’s Leonardo da Vinci Award for Excellence in Literature.