Dominick J. Salemi

Dominick John Salemi is the editor and publisher of Brutarian magazine, a fringe culture magazine based on the concept of art brut.

Personal life

Salemi was born in Brooklyn, New York on March 14, 1956, the son of Dominick Francis Salemi and Joan Ann (Cavallaro) Salemi. He is Roman Catholic. In 1989, he married Sandra Smiroldo; they divorced in 1994. His second marriage was in 2001 to Barbara Dobyns, a former Animal Planet programmer from the Washington, D.C. area. They divorced in 2002.

Education

He attended the University of Notre Dame from 1974 to 1978, where he was a dean’s list student majoring in both English and Philosophy. He then attended Wake Forest University from 1980 to 1983, majoring in law, where he received a juris doctor degree.

Professional career

After graduating from Notre Dame, Salemi worked as contract specialist for the Office of Education from 1978 to 1980. After returning to school for his law degree, he was hired as a trademark attorney for the United States Patent and Trademark Office in 1983, where he is still employed as of 2007.

In 1991, at the suggestion of his first wife, Salemi launched Brutarian, an off-color quarterly magazine, which is still being published as of 2007. Brutarian is notable in the small press world as being one of the longest-running small press magazines with a distribution of under 10,000, yet one that pays top rates and regularly features big names in music and fiction.