Local writers will celebrate To Topos: Poetry International and the release of its ninth volume.

"Ahani: Indigenous American Poetry" guest editor and featured reader Allison Adele Hedge Coke will join guest readers Charles Goodrich, Rick Borsten and Karen Holmberg for the opening of the reading room at Browsers' Bookstore in Albany and to celebrate Poetry Enterprises' winning an Oregon Literary Arts grant for To Topos.

The event is at 3 p.m. Saturday at Browsers' Books, 1425 Pacific Blvd. S.E.

Hedge Coke is a faculty member of the English department and Master of Fine Arts program in writing at Northern Michigan University.

Goodrich worked for 25 years as a professional gardener, and has also worked as a correctional work crew supervisor, a short-order cook and a carpenter. He is the author of a volume of poems, "Insects of South Corvallis." Goodrich lives near the confluence of the Marys and Willamette Rivers in south Corvallis .

Holmberg won the Vassar Miller Prize in 2000 for her book of poems, "The Perseids," and her individual poems have appeared in such journals as The Paris Review, Slate, The Nation, and the Southern Poetry Review. She teaches at Oregon State University in the Master of Fine Arts program and for the English department.

Borsten has been in Oregon since l978. He currently works part-time for Benton County Mental Health and writes in the mornings. His first novel, "The Great Equalizer," was a finalist for the 1987 Oregon Book Award for Fiction and National Endowment for the Arts New American Writing Selection.