Award-winning journalist and internationally-recognized speaker Donna Jackson Nakazawa began writing at twelve years old, after her father passed away unexpectedly. Recording her thoughts and feelings in a journal helped her to make sense of a world without him. When she came to the last page of her diary, she wrote, “I think I’m going to be a writer.”

Later, in college, she joined the staff of Duke’s literary journal. She received a grant to write in France. When she returned home, she enrolled in the Radcliffe Publishing Program and found work in the magazine industry as a science journalist.

She began writing books. To date, she has authored 7 books which explore the intersection of neuroscience, immunology, and human emotion. Her mission is to translate emerging science in ways that help those with chronic conditions find healing.

Her upcoming book, Girls on the Brink: Helping Our Daughters Thrive in an Era of Increased Anxiety, Depression, and Social Media (Random House/Harmony, 2022) is available for pre-order now and will be available wherever books are sold this summer. In this book, Donna explores today’s growing adolescent female mental health crisis. Anyone on the front lines of caring for girls today—parents, educators, counselors—knows that girls are more prone to depression and anxiety than ever before. Now we have the science to understand why. During the critical neurodevelopmental window of adolescence a confluence of modern toxic stressors are altering the female stress-immune response in ways that can derail female thriving. Drawing on insights from both the latest science and interviews with girls, Donna guides readers through 15 “antidote” strategies to help teenage girls flourish even in the face of stress, creating a new playbook for how we—parents, families, and the human tribe—can ensure a healthy emotional inner life for all of our girls.

Donna is the author of six previous books, including The Angel and The Assassin: The Tiny Brain Cell That Changed the Course of Medicine (Random House/Ballantine, 2020), named one of the best books of 2020 by WIRED magazine. It illuminates recent groundbreaking discoveries that elucidate the biological link between our physical and mental health. Hailed as “riveting,” “stunning,” and “visionary,” The Angel and the Assassin offers us a radically reconceived picture of human health.

Her book Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology, and How You Can Heal (Atria / Simon & Schuster, 2015) was a finalist for the 2015 Books for a Better Life Award. She is also the author of The Last Best Cure (Hudson Street Press / Penguin, 2013), The Autoimmune Epidemic (Touchstone / Simon & Schuster, 2009), and Does Anybody Else Look Like Me? A Parent’s Guide to Raising Multicultural Children (Perseus, 2003).

Her writing has been published in Wired, The Boston Globe, Stat, The Washington Post, Health Affairs, Aeon, More, Parenting, AARP Magazine, Glamour, and elsewhere. For her reporting on health-science, Donna received the AESKU lifetime achievement award and the National Health Information Award. She has appeared on The Today Show, National Public Radio, NBC News, and ABC News.

In addition to her work as a science journalist, Donna has been a speaker at numerous universities, conferences and medical centers, including the Harvard Division of Science Library Series, the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine, the University of Arizona, Rutgers University Behavioral Health, the Peace & Justice Institute, Learning and the Brain, the Royal Society of Medicine SIRPA Conference on Chronic Pain and Emotion, Johns Hopkins, and the International Congress on Autoimmunity.

Donna is also the creator and founder of the narrative writing-to-heal program, Your Healing Narrative, which uses the process of Neural Re-Narrating™ to help participants recognize and override the brain’s old thought patterns and internalized stories, and create a new, more p