Lois-Ann Yamanaka, poet, author, teacher and mother, appears at Native Books/Na Mea Hawai'i from 3 to 4:30 p.m. today for a reading and talk-story session.

She is the latest local writer to be featured in an ongoing pidgin reading series that last month featured the launch of "Da Spoken Word" by Lee Tonouchi.

Yamanaka will read and sign copies of her most recent children's book, "The Heart's Language," a book about a boy who teaches his loved ones his own, unique way of communicating. The book is dedicated to Yamanaka's son, JohnJohn, who is autistic and whom she lovingly calls, "the Little Priest who came to heal."

Yamanaka is the recipient of many national literary prizes, including a National Endowment for the Humanities grant and a Lannan Foundation Award. She writes in the lyrical pidgin spoken by the descendants of the contract laborers who worked the sugar plantations of Hawai'i. She is the author of five books for adults, including "Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers." She was born in Ho'olehua on Moloka'i, the oldest of four girls. She lives in Honolulu with her husband, John, and JohnJohn. When she is not writing, she operates Na'au, a writing school, with her longtime best friend Melvin E. Spencer III.

The Pigdin Line-Up, sponsored by Native Books/Na Mea Hawai'i, features pidgin authors, poets and storytellers who use Hawaiian pidgin as their preferred method of oral and written communication.