DONNA NUCCI

I was inspired to write THE PENNY after losing my mother to dementia and after decades of work as a nurse and healthcare leader, witnessing how women’s lives, choices, and sacrifices are often absorbed quietly and left unnamed. Nursing trained me to listen not only to what is spoken, but to what is withheld, to the silences women carry around caregiving, desire, grief, and duty. This novel grew from lived proximity to loss and from observing how devotion, when unexamined, can become erasure.

I come to fiction through decades of professional experience in nursing and healthcare leadership, working closely with patients and families at the thresholds of birth, death, and profound transition. My career has centered on listening to what people say, what they cannot say, and what is carried silently across generations. That practice of deep witnessing shapes the emotional architecture of THE PENNY.