Donna Jo Napoli

Who is Donna Jo Napoli?

Donna Jo Napoli is an American writer of children's and young-adult fiction, as well as a prominent linguist.

She has worked in syntax, phonetics, phonology, morphology, historical and comparative linguistics, Romance studies, structure of Japanese, structure of American Sign Language, poetics, writing for ESL students, and mathematical and linguistic analysis of folk dance. She has taught linguistics at Smith College, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Georgetown University, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and is currently a professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College.

Born the youngest of four children in Miami, February 28, 1948, Napoli received both her B.A. and PhD from Harvard, before a postdoctoral fellowship in linguistics at M.I.T. Napoli has dual citizenship in the U.S. and Italy

Her children's books, listed below, have been translated into Chinese, Danish, Dutch, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Portuguese, Spanish, and will be in Thai and Polish.