Donna jo napolis biography

Donna Jo Napoli is an American writer of children's and young adult fiction, as well as a linguist.
Born in 1948, she grew up in an Italian American family in Miami, Florida, the youngest of four children.
Donna Jo Napoli was born on February 28, 1948.

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Storm

A sixteen-year-old stowaway discovers her destiny on Noah’s ark in this riveting reimagining from award-winning author and “master storyteller” (SLJ) Donna Jo Napoli.

The rain starts suddenly, hard and fast. After days of downpour, her family lost, Sebah takes shelter in a tree, eating pine cones and the raw meat of animals that float by. With each passing day, her companion, a boy named Aban, grows weaker. When their tree is struck by lightning, Sebah is tempted just to die in the flames rather than succumb to a slow, watery death. Instead, she and Aban build a raft. What they find on the stormy seas is beyond imagining: a gigantic ark. But Sebah does not know what she’ll find on board, and Aban is too weak to leave their raft.

Themes of family, loss, and ultimately, survival and love make for a timeless story. Donna Jo Napoli has imagined a new protagonist to tell the story of Noah and his ark. As rain batters the earth, Noah, his family, and hordes of animals wait out the storm, ready to carry out their duty of repopulating the planet. Hidden belowdecks…is Sebah.

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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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Make a Gardnerian Connection:

The cover of Napoli’s short novel “The Great God Pan.”

A few weeks ago, Jason Mankey created a lovely post tracing the “literary cult of Pan” that ended with his reading the evocative passage on Pan in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908). This lovely piece got me thinking about all the times I’ve encountered Pan in prose and poetry–a not infrequent encounter given that the writers I study are usually caught up somewhere in Pan’s cult. Eventually I found myself dwelling on a young adult novel published just as I was entering college: Donna Jo Napoli’s The Great God Pan (2003).

For those of you who are unaware, Napoli is an esteemed linguist who began publishing young adult novels in 1993 with The Magic Circle, a beautiful re-telling of Hansel and Gretel that is rich and textured…and makes plenty of medieval magic. These re-tellings have largely become Napoli’s bread and butter in young adult literature, and she makes great use of fairy tale, myth, and hi