Biography

Donna was born in Brooklyn, New York and raised in southern California. She attended UC Santa Cruz from 1974 to 1979, where she studied psychobiology. She became interested in orcas when she moved to Seattle in 1982 and started dreaming about them.

Her advocacy for whales began in 1983, when NOAA Fisheries granted Sea World a permit to capture 100 orcas off the coast of Alaska. Donna wrote her first Letter to the Editor and worked with Greenpeace to help stop the captures. Sea World was eventually forced to abandon its plans.

In 1992 she produced her first public event when she invited  Paul Spong to give a presentation about Orcas and the Corky Project. She started a group called Orca Alliance, and hosted events including Orca Fest 95 on the Seattle waterfront. In 1996 she spearheaded Lolita Come Home - a symposium focused on returning southern resident orca Lolita (aka Tokitae) from the Miami Seaquarium to her family in the Pacific Northwest. The symposium was co-hosted with then-Governor Lowry and Secretary of State Ralph Munro, and resulted in the Seaquarium asking to see a proposal for Lolita's release.

Through it all, she continued to write. She performed at Spoken Word poetry readings around Seattle, and had a poem selected for display at the Bumbershoot Literary Fair in 1993. She was a technical editor at a consulting engineering firm, where she implemented the first Macintosh publishing system, and began working at Adobe (then Aldus) in 1993.

The lessons she learned in organizing for Lolita, and as a team and project manager in her software career, were put to good use when Springer was discovered near Seattle in 2002. Donna worked closely with NOAA, other agencies and nonprofits to support Springer’s rescue, rehabilitation and release. Every five years since then, she has co-organized team reunions to celebrate Springer’s homecoming.

Inspired by Springer’s success, and alarmed at the plight of the endangered southern resident orcas, Donna founded The Whale Trail in 2008 with a team of partners. She recently served as a member of Governor Jay Inslee’s Task Force on Southern Resident Orca Recovery, where she championed a licensing program for commercial whale-watching and other measures to reduce noise and disturbance around J, K and L pods.

Donna lives in West Seattle on the edge of Puget Sound. Her favorite things to do are to share Springer’s story with libraries, schools and community groups, and to help people see whales in Puget Sound.

Donna spent her early years writing poems, stories and plays. Her Op Eds have appeared in Crosscut and the Seattle Times. Orca Rescue! is her first book.

Professional Affiliations

Member, Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators

Selected Writing

How we can honor the orca Tahlequah’s grief (Seattle Times Op Ed, 1/24/2025)
Lessons for Lolita from the orca reunion of Springer (Seattle Times Op Ed, 4/16/2023)
Cut the Toxins and Boat Noise, and Boost Salmon, so Orcas Can Survive (Seattle Times, 8/18/2018)
To Help Save Orcas, Pause Whale-Watching (co-authored with Dr. Tim Ragen, Crosscut, 11/23/2020 )