Donna Nucci is a writer, nurse, and generational storyteller

whose work explores the sacred and the unspoken.

For over 30 years, she was a bedside nurse—walking with families through the most intimate moments of life: birth, death, joy, and unbearable loss. Her work in pediatric oncology, hospice, and labor and delivery taught her that nurses feel everything—and are trained to show almost none of it.

When Donna’s mother died after a long decline from dementia, something broke—and something opened. In the wake of that grief, a story she had carried for years began to rise. It wasn’t her mother’s story, but it belonged to her lineage: five generations of women bound by blood, silence, shame, and sacred knowing. The Penny is the novel that came through.

It asks: What do we inherit from the women before us

and what, finally, can we lay down?

Donna is a mother of four grown humans, a healthcare entrepreneur, and a voice for the nurses who carry stories no one else can hold. Her next book will explore the private grief nurses bear and the truths we speak only when the shift is over.

She lives on the Connecticut shoreline with her (very patient) husband and their dog, Rosie. When she’s not writing, she’s cooking from memory, painting badly but joyfully, or planning her next trip—ideally one that ends in olive oil and ocean.

Donna is currently building a platform to support others navigating loss especially the slow, complicated grief of watching a parent disappear over time. She believes death does not close the door—it opens it.