Hometown Voices is a local reading & performance series, founded in 2023 by Cynthia Mazzant, founder and artistic director of Tempest Productions, and Rachael Lyon Wiley, local poet. Each month, we invite local writers and performers to present their work at Tempest Studios, a creative space located at 140 Kelly Alley in downtown State College. Each event is held on the fourth Sunday of the month at 3pm and features two writers and/or performers. We've hosted poets, fiction writers, essayists, playwrights, dancers, musicians, and performance artists. Hometown Voices features locals from all backgrounds and with all levels of experience. All readings are free and open to the public. Parking in the Fraser Deck (located just above Tempest Studios) is free on Sundays. Come enjoy local writers and performers and support your creative community!

On Sunday, October 26, at 3pm, local poet and founder of Ridgelines, a language arts nonprofit, Abby Minor, will be reading alongside Lisa Mangini, local poet and Penn State faculty member, at Tempest Studios (140 Kelly Alley).

Abby Minor lives in East Penns Valley, where she works on poems, essays, gardens, farms, and projects exploring regional and reproductive politics. Her first book, As I Said: A Dissent (Ricochet Editions, 2022), is a collection of long documentary poems concerning abortion, justice, and citizenship in U.S. history. Granddaughter of Appalachian tinkerers and Yiddish-speaking New Yorkers, she teaches poetry in our region’s low-income nursing homes, facilitates after-school art classes and summer camps for rural kids, and co-directs a local education nonprofit called Ridgelines Language Arts. Her poems and essays appear in Fence, American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, Cut Bank, the Boston Review, and Feminist Studies.

Lisa Mangini is the author of five collections of poetry and short prose. Some of her work can be found in Huffpost, Ms. Magazine, McSweeney's, Mid-American Review, American Journal of Nursing, Memoir Mixtapes, and elsewhere. She was the Founding Editor of Paper Nautilus (2011-2023), an independent chapbook press publishing over 40 titles of poetry, fiction, and literary non-fiction. She directed Penn State's Red Weather Reading Series from 2017-2020, and was awarded the English Department's Lecturer in Teaching Excellence Award in 2020. She has served as the Department's Internship Coordinator since 2022. Lisa has taught a variety of both online and residential courses at Penn State, including first-year composition courses (ENGL 15, 15E, 137H/138T), Creative Writing (ENGL 212, 213, 215), Writing in the Humanities (ENGL 202B), and as a tutor in the Writing Center (ENGL 5). You can find her at lisamangini.com, chasing her preschooler, or knitting in public spaces.