Donna jo napoli author biography outline

Although Napoli always had a love of writing, she decided not to pursue it as a career in early life. Napoli's novels tackle real-world problems children of any age may face, including family hardships, anxiety, phobias, and illness. As explained in a TED Talk, Napoli finds it important that children read stories about real-life problems they may face, to help comfort those who are experiencing similar difficulties.

Her children's books have been translated into many languages, including different sign languages. In the early s, Donna Jo Napoli began a program of research on sign languages and developed connections within the Deaf community. Napoli has contributed to linguistic research on sign languages, including the publication of the book Primary movement in sign languages in Combining her interest in language and literature, Napoli has collaborated with others to create bimodal bilingual e-books for hearing parents to read to their deaf children.

The books are translated into the oral language relevant for each signed language. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikidata item. Want to Read saving…. Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Donna Jo Napoli Goodreads Author ,.

Richard Tchen. David Wiesner Illustrator. Series by Donna Jo Napoli. Judy Schachner Illustrator. Christina Balit Illustrator. Donna Napoli is now following. Joy McCullough. Author of Blood Water Paint. Donna Napoli wants to read. El recreo recess by Rosa Bustillo. Quotes by Donna Jo Napoli? Quotes are added by the Goodreads community and are not verified by Goodreads.

Learn more. Each sparkle sets aflame the pain in my heart. Sequoyah Book Award. Ugly Nominee — Children's — Bound Twists on the Tale — Breath What Ails you? Beast Gateway to Faerie — Zel Gateway to Faerie — Mythopoeic Awards. Beast Finalist — Children's Literature — National Book Critics Circle Award. Sydney Taylor Book Award. Storm Winner — The King of Mulberry Street Winner — Stones in Water Winner — Trouble On The Tracks Jimmy, the Pickpocket of the Palace The Bravest Thing Zel The Magic Circle Parents' Choice Book Award.

Kentucky Bluegrass Award. Bound Nominee — Grades — Albert Winner — Grades — Pennsylvania Young Reader's Choice Award. Three Days Nominee — Grades — The Prince of the Pond Nominee — Grades — Read Aloud Indiana Book Award. Stones in Water High School — The Prince of the Pond Intermediate — South Dakota Children's Book Awards. Albert Nominee — Prairie Bud — Three Days Nominee — Prairie Pasque — Nutmeg Book Award.

The Prince of the Pond Nominee — Intermediate — Soccer Shock Nominee — Intermediate — Vermont Golden Dome Book Award. Stones in Water Nominee. Bound Nominee. The King of Mulberry Street Nominee. Zel Nominee. Daughter of Venice Nominee. Mogo, the Third Warthog Nominee. Jimmy, the Pickpocket of the Palace Nominee. Sunshine State Young Reader's Award.

Mogo, the Third Warthog Nominee — Grades — Three Days Nominee — Golden Kite Award. Breath Honor — Honor, Fiction — Stones in Water Winner — Fiction — The King of Mulberry Street Nominee — Buckaroo Book Award. Albert Nominee — Nevada Young Readers' Award. Daughter of Venice Winner — Young Adult — Sirena Spinners For the Love of Venice Crazy Jack The Best Children's Books of the Year.

In a Flash Hunger: A Tale of Courage Storm Fourteen and Older — A Single Pearl Under Five — Lights on the Nile Nine to Twelve — The Wager Twelve to Fourteen — Alligator Bayou Twelve to Fourteen — Ready to Dream Five to Nine — Grand Canyon Reader Award. Albert Nominee — Picture Books — Tayshas High School Reading List. Hush: An Irish Princess' Tale Beast Stones in Water Children's Favorites Awards.

Hunger: A Tale of Courage Junior — Ugly Alligator Bayou Louisiana. Golden Archer Award. Fish Girl Graphic Novels — Nerdy Book Award. Black-Eyed Susan Book Award. The White Ravens. Historical Novel Society Editors' Choice. Notable Children's Book. Volunteer State Book Award. Beast Nominee — Young Adult — Isinglass Teen Read Award. Bound Nominee — In addition to her numerous professional publications of both books and articles, Napoli was also writing poetry.

A miscarriage between her first and second children sent her into an emotional tailspin, and to find her center, she began writing daily letters to a friend. That was the start of my writing career. Finally, her first children's book was published by Carolrhoda Books in Minnesota. The Hero of Barletta was a retelling of an Italian folk tale—Napoli and her family had spent many summers in Italy—in which a clever giant saves his town from an advancing army.

Adam, the ten-year-old protagonist of the novel, discovers that he has magic freckles—they can both see and talk. He decides to use this secret to help him earn a place on the school soccer team. Napoli first sent the book to an agent who recommended cutting the freckles as they were too "dopey," but advice from her children and other writers prevailed.

Napoli submitted the book unchanged to Dutton in and it was accepted. Napoli's next book for middle-grade readers, The Prince of the Pond: Otherwise Known as De Fawg Pin, was a result of family storytelling nights and employs the fairy tale frog-prince motif, but with a unique twist. A prince is turned into a frog by a hag, and is then taken under the protective arm of Jade, a female frog who teaches him the ropes in the pond.

Blessed with a prodigious number of spawn, the sensitive frog prince determines to raise some of them personally. Yet when a princess passes by, the frog prince leaps to the cheek, kisses her, and becomes a prince once again, leaving Jade and their offspring behind. Napoli's first young adult novel, The Magic Circle, was inspired by an innocent question posed by the author's daughter, Eva, as to the preponderance of wicked witches and stepmothers in fairy tales, and the dearth of equally evil warlocks and stepfathers.

In Napoli's rendition, the witch was a good-hearted woman at one time who learned sorcery to become a healer, but evil spirits have turned her into a bad witch, with a hunger for children. Lisa Dennis, writing in School Library Journal, observed "a strongly medieval flavor" in the setting, characterization, and tone, and concluded that "Napoli's writing and the clarity of her vision make this story fresh and absorbing.

A brilliantly conceived and beautifully executed novel that is sure to be appreciated by thoughtful readers. Told alternately from the point of view of Zel held in the tower, the prince who wants to save her, and Zel's witch mother who put the girl in the tower, the book plunges into the psychology of the characters. Both stories had a little help from Napoli's children; the first was inspired by her son Michael's fear of drowning, and the second by her daughter Eva's desire to become a veterinarian.

On vacation with grandparents in Iowa, nine-year-old Mikey is continually confronted with his fear of drowning in When the Water Closes over My Head, and eventually surmounts this phobia. The book is "a funny, easily read story that boys and girls should take to like ducks to water," enthused a Kirkus Reviews commentator. Hazel Rochman, writing in Booklist, drew attention to Napoli's technique of "tightly structured, cinematic episodes," and use of dialogue that captured the "daily tangle of close relationships," and concluded that "kids will want more stories about this family.

Having overcome his fear of drowning, fourth-grader Mikey returns in Napoli's On Guard, this time to confront anxieties of another sort.

Donna jo napoli author biography outline

Mikey discovers the sport of fencing, and determines to win the medal his teacher awards weekly to a student who has impressed her with a particular skill, accomplishment, or quality. A Publishers Weekly reviewer described the work as uneven in many respects, noting, for instance, that "the pacing seems clotted around climactic moments," but nevertheless commented that "readers may come away with new thoughts about a different era.

I believe that if you keep your eyes and ears and mind and heart open, you will find plenty to write about—more than anyone could ever write in a lifetime…. I write from my heart and gut. So it's not surprising that a lot of my views on life are discernible in my books. But I never set out to convince people of a particular moral. And I deeply resent children's books that do.

An organized professional, Napoli even writes in her laundry room so that she can do two tasks at once. Her advice to young writers is simple: write what you know about; write about something that is important; and use good language. A conscientious re-writer, Napoli gets feedback from her editor, family, school children, and even strangers on the street.

If Napoli tries not to shove a certain theme down the throats of her readers, she still has a message. Children offer fertile ground. 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. Napoli never planned to become a writer. Born in , 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. Then we'd get kicked out of where we were living and my parents would fight and I'd go sit in a tree and read a book and live in the world I created inside my head. Napoli was a talented student in her teens, and was accepted at Harvard University. During her first year there she took a required composition class, which had one fiction assignment.

After her professor read the assignment, she suggested that Napoli could pursue a career as a novelist. After earning an undergraduate degree in mathematics, Napoli decided to study Romance languages in graduate school. These are Italian, French, Spanish, and other languages descended from Latin. She went on to earn a doctorate from Harvard in She also spent a year studying linguistics, which is the scientific study of languages and their structure, sounds, meanings, and relation to human culture.

During her college years she married and began a family that would eventually number five children. Napoli spent the next dozen years living and working in a number of college towns, from Northampton, Massachusetts, to Ann Arbor , Michigan. She became a professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania in , and also served as chair of its linguistics department.

She is the author of five books in her professional field. Her first book for children, The Hero of Barletta, was published in Its story is based on an Italian folktale about a giant who works to save the village where he lives from an invading army. But Napoli's second career as a writer did not come about quickly. Her early training in mathematics had served her well, she believed.

So mathematics teaches persistence. And there may be no more important quality for a writer than persistence. Napoli only turned to writing fiction as a second job after she experienced a personal loss. For months afterward she exchanged letters with a friend, who came to her a year later, letters in hand, and suggested they would make a terrific novel.

Not surprisingly, many of her books deal with a loss or challenge, and often feature characters who are coming to terms with a change or disruption in their lives. Soccer Shock was one of Napoli's more fantastical early works. It was also her first children's story that was not a folktale retold. Its hero is Adam, a ten-year-old who is jolted by an electric shock.

As a result, his freckles now talk to him, and Adam tries to use his newfound power to become the winning athlete on his soccer team. Napoli wrote two other novels in which Adam confronts various challenges, Shark Shock and Shelley Shock. Mikey, age nine, is terrified of taking swimming lessons, and his older sister teases him about it, but he eventually learns to overcome his fear.

Booklist 's Hazel Rochman liked the fact that Napoli's characters debunked gender stereotypes — Mikey cooks better than his sister, and his little brother likes to play dress-up. When their grandmother disapproves, Mikey defends his brother. Rochman also noted the way Napoli had the characters interact at several levels, where they "bicker about breakfast cereal and also confront elemental issues of grief and rivalry and love.

Napoli also wrote about a young man with agoraphobia, or the fear of leaving one's home. The title character in Albert struggles to leave the house day after day, but is unable to do so. One day he sticks his hand out of the window to check the weather, and a bird begins building a nest for her eggs in it. Now he has to remain at the window day after day, but in the process he begins to observe the world outside.

When the eggs hatch and the birds leave their nest, Albert realizes he, too, is ready to leave and explore the world. Napoli has said that The Bravest Thing, one of her books for readers age eight to eleven, is her favorite among the works she has authored. The story deals with multiple sorrows: ten-year-old Laurel has a pet rabbit named Bun Bun who has a litter, but Bun Bun refuses to nurse her babies and they die.

Laurel decides to mate her again, and the same thing happens. In the meantime, Laurel also learns her beloved aunt has cancer, and that she herself has scoliosis, or a curvature of the spine that will require her to wear a brace. Napoli's handling of the difficult subject matter, noted a reviewer for Publishers Weekly, "inspires the reader to believe that obstacles, no matter how daunting, can be made smaller through courage.

Napoli's five children often provided story ideas in an indirect way.