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. (Romance Languages -- the Linguistics Plan A, 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, Portuguese, Spanish, and will be in Greek, Thai, and Polish. 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 member of the editorial board 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), the Sydney Taylor Award given by the Association of Jewish Libraries (for Stones in Water, and, honor book, The King of Mulberry Street and the Parents' Choice Silver Honor Award (for North and The King of Mulberry Street).

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