We're topping off the Creatures of the Deep Weekend with a visit from author Donna Jo Napoli, who will be sharing and signing her newest book, Fish Girl.

Fish Girl is a fairy tale, a coming of age story, and Donna Jo's first graphic work, created with author and illustrator David Wiesner. Set along a fantastical imagining of a Jersey shore boardwalk, a young mermaid called Fish Girl has been caught and is held and forced to perform in an aquarium. A chance encounter with an ordinary girl leads to a friendship thatinspires Fish Girl's longing for freedom, independence, and a life beyond the aquarium tank.

Donna Jo Napoli (born February 28, 1948) is an American writer of children's and young adult fiction, as well as a prominent linguist.

She has worked in syntax, phonetics, phonology, morphology, historical and comparative linguistics, Romance studies, structure of Japanese, structure of American Sign Language, poetics, writing for ESL students, and mathematical and linguistic analysis of folk dance. She has taught linguistics at Smith College, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Georgetown University, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the University of Pennsylvania, and is currently a professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College.

Born the youngest of four children in Miami, February 28, 1948, Napoli received both her B.A. (mathematics, 1970) and PhD (Romance Languages – the Linguistics Plan A, 1973) from Harvard, before a postdoctoral fellowship in linguistics at M.I.T. Napoli has dual citizenship in the U.S. and Italy