The final piece of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh's $55 million capital improvement effort falls into place Saturday when the East Liberty facility reopens after a 13-month makeover.

The ceremony to inaugurate the renovated branch at 103 S. Whitfield St. will be at 10 a.m., followed by a series of activities until 2 p.m. Tours will begin at 11 a.m. and will be repeated every hour.

The $5.6 million upgrade converted the 1960s-era building into a "green" facility with 66,000 books, magazines, CDs and DVDs, more space, wireless Internet and increased computer terminals.

East Liberty will also now be the new home of the library's Heritage Collection, 150,000 volumes of rare and historic material from Western Pennsylvania's past. The collection was previously housed at the old Allegheny Regional Library, North Side, now closed.

Jewell Parker Rhodes, North Side native and Carnegie Mellon graduate, has published her first children's book, "Ninth Ward" (Little, Brown, $15.99). It's a survival tale from Katrina's assault on New Orleans. Ms. Rhodes is the author of five adult novels and a memoir and is professor of creative writing at Arizona State University.

Kim Edwards used Pittsburgh as the setting for her first novel, "The Memory Keeper's Daughter" (2005). Now a professor of creative writing at the University of Kentucky, Ms. Edwards will be publishing her second, "The Lake of Dreams" (Viking, $26.95), in January.

Paola Corso, writer-in-residence at Western Connecticut State University, grew up in Pittsburgh, where she sets many stories in her new collection, "Catina's Haircut: A Novel in Stories" (University of Wisconsin Press, $21.95), to be published next month.

Looking for more from the Post-Gazette? Join PG+, our members-only web site. You'll get exclusive sports content, opinion, financial information, discounts from retailers and restaurants, and more. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.