Celeste Raspanti

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Celeste Rita Raspanti (born September 10, 1928) is an American playwright who has written and produced full‑length and one‑act plays. She was born in Chicago to an Italian immigrant father and an Italian‑American mother. She began writing after winning a high school essay contest in 1943. A former nun and retired college professor, she also writes for scholarly journals and lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Raspanti is known for plays about the Holocaust. Her first major work, I Never Saw Another Butterfly, is based on the life of survivor Raja Englanderova and stories from the Theresienstadt concentration camp. The title echoes a well-known book of drawings and poems by children from Terezin. She followed with No Fading Star and The Terezin Promise. She enriches her plays with information from visits to camps, oral histories, and her friendship with survivors, especially Raja Englanderova.