ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dianne K. Salerni lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania with her husband Bob and two daughters, Gabrielle (11) and Gina (8). She graduated from St. Mark's High School in Wilmington, Delaware and received her Bachelor's Degree in Elementary Education from the University of Delaware. She subsequently earned a Master's in Language Arts Education at the University of Pennsylvania before taking a job teaching in the Avon Grove School District. She has now been teaching fourth and fifth grade at Avon Grove for 19 years.

Dianne's full length, historical fiction novel High Spirits was published in 2007 through iUniverse.

In 2009, her horror short story Necromancer appeared in the first volume of Visions, a pulp fiction anthology published by Strider Nolan Media.

Writing has been a life-long hobby, and she frequently shares her work with her students. Dianne has published a number of educational products with McDonald Publishing, but High Spirits is her first published novel and her first venture into the historical fiction genre. Her original idea for High Spirits involved a contemporary humorous story about talent-less spirit mediums, but research into the history of seances led Dianne into discovering the fascinating story of the Fox Sisters and diverted her original plan. The novel took her two years to write, and at times Dianne could have sworn that the characters were haunting her in a quest to have their story told. In particular, she blames Dr. Kane for doubling the length of the novel, as he "demanded" more and more opportunities to tell his exciting stories. Some of her favorite scenes to write included Kane and Leah, whose "spirited" personalities clashed heartily as they battled for control of Maggie's life.

Necromancer evolved from a short story written over 20 years ago, when Dianne was a graduate student working in the Rare Books Library at the University of Pennsylvania. This adult short story about a mysterious scholar attempting to raise the dead was "resurrected" (get it?), revised and updated, and now appears in the first volume of Visions: Chronicles of a Visionary Universe.