Donna Jo Napoli (born February 28, 1948) is an author of children's and young adult books, as well as a prominent linguist who 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. (mathematics, 1970) and Ph.D. (General and Romance Linguistics, 1973) 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, Persian, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and will be in Portuguese and Thai. Many of her children's books are re-tellings of fairy tales, including The Magic Circle, Crazy Jack, Spinners, Zel, Bound, and Beast. Other children's stories are historical fiction based in Italy, including Daughter of Venice and For the Love of Venice. Her publications in linguistics include Syntactic argumentation (with Emily Rando). (Washington, DC: Georgetown Univ. Press, 1979), Syntax: Theory and Problems (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993), and Linguistics: Theory and Problems (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996), with dozens of articles in the scholarly journals. She is a former editor of the premiere journal Language. Napoli has won numerous awards for her work, including the Golden Kite Award given by the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (for Stones in Water) and the Parents' Choice Silver Honor Award (for North).
Books by Donna Jo Napoli
- The Hero of Barletta, published April 1991
- Syntax Theory and Problems, published April 1993
- Soccer Shock, published November 1993
- The Magic Circle, published June 1995
- Linguistics: An Introduction, published April 1996
- The Bravest Thing, published May 1997
- Sirena, published October 1998
- Zel, published November 1998
- On Guard, published April 1999
- Stones in Water, published November 1999
- For the Love of Venice, published June 2000
- Changing Tunes, published June 2000
- New Voices, published August 2000
- Happy Holidays, published October 2000
- Spinners, published February 2001
- Hang in There, published April 2001
- Crazy Jack, published August 2001
- Beast, published June 2002
- Three Days, published July 2003
- Shelley Shock, published August 2003
- Breath, published November 2003
- Daughter of Venice, published December 2003
- Song of the Magdalene, published April 2004
- North, published May 2004
- Bound, published November 2004
- The Great God Pan, published February 2005
- The King of Mulberry Street, published October 2005
- Fire in the Hills, published August 2006
- Hush, published October 2007
- The Smile, published 2008
External links
- Donna Jo Napoli's Curriculum vitae
- Official website
- Author Profile and Interview, 2000.
- Phillips, Scott. Donna Jo Napoli: A Hunger for Words, Sept. 19, 2006.
