Donna jo napoli biography of williams

February 28, 1948 • Miami, Florida

Author

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