Donna jo napoli biography

Donna Jo Napoli (born February 28, 1948) is an American writer of children's and young adult fiction, as well as a linguist.
Donna Jo Napoli is both a linguist and a writer of children's fiction.
Born on February 28, 1948, Donna Jo Napoli is an author, linguist, and professor at Swarthmore College at the time of this writing.

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Donna Jo Napoli Biography

February 28, 1948 • Miami, Florida

Author

Napoli, Donna Jo.

Reproduced by permission of Donna Jo Napoli.

Donna Jo Napoli moonlights from her job as a professor of linguistics at a Pennsylvania college to write books for children and young adults. Her stories range from magical retellings of ancient or medieval folktales, like Zel and The Magic Circle, to realistic, emotionally wrenching tales of kids confronting divorce and death in their family, such as The Bravest Thing. An essay on her career in the St. James Guide to Young Adult Writers commended Napoli's "belief in the ability of ordinary people to overcome and to survive."

Lost home more than once

Napoli never planned to become a writer. Born in 1948, she grew up in an Italian American family in Miami, Florida, the youngest of four children. She suffered from an eye problem that was not diagnosed until she was ten, but once it was corrected, she became an avid reader. But there were still other challenges in her early life.

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Donna Jo Napoli was born on February 28, 1948, in Miami, Florida, to parents Vincent Robert Napoli and Helen Gloria Napoli. Having vision problems as a young child, Napoli struggled to learn how to read. It was not until the age of 10 that Napoli overcame her vision problems and became interested in reading. When she finally began reading, she jumped into biographies and history books, such as A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943) and the works of Mary Renault. Through elementary and high school, Napoli traveled from school to school, as her father worked as a contractor, built their family new homes, and sold them soon after.

Napoli earned an AB in Mathematics, an MA in Italian Literature, and then a PhD in Romance Languages and Literature from Harvard University. During her junior year at Harvard, she married Barrow Ray Furrow. They eventually had five children: Elena, Michael, Nicholas, Eva, and Robert. In 1973, Napoli was a visiting scientist in Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Starting her career, Napoli lectured at Smith College, the University of Nort

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Donna Jo Napoli

American children's writer and linguist

Donna Jo Napoli (born February 28, 1948) is an American writer of children's and young adult fiction, as well as a linguist. She currently is a professor at Swarthmore College teaching Linguistics in all different forms (music, Theater (structure), dance, Comparative Literature Studies). She has also taught linguistics at Smith College, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Georgetown University, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and the University of Pennsylvania.^[2]

Early life and personal life

Donna Jo Napoli was born the youngest of four children in Miami, February 28, 1948, to an Italian-American family. After correcting an eyesight problem left undiagnosed until the age of 10, Napoli became an avid reader.^[3] From then on she found solace in the escape provided by books, using reading as comfort during family troubles and instability stemming from her father's gambling problem.^[3]

Napoli has dual citizenship in the U.S. and Italy. She is married and has fi