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 typically 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, November 30, at 3pm, the voice of Poetry Moment on WPSU-FM, Marjorie Maddox, will be reading alongside poet and Penn State professor, Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, at Tempest Studios (140 Kelly Alley).

Professor Emerita of English at the Lock Haven campus of Commonwealth University, Marjorie Maddox has published 17 collections of poetry—including How Can I Look It Up When I Don’t Know How It’s Spelled? Spelling Mnemonics and Grammar Tricks (Kelsay Books), Seeing Things (Wildhouse), and Hover Here (Broadstone, 2025), as well as the ekphrastic collaborations Small Earthly Space; Heart Speaks, Is Spoken For (both with photographer Karen Elias) and In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind (with daughter Anna Lee Hafer www.hafer.work and others), a 2023 Dragonfly Book Award in photography/fine arts and American Fiction Winner Award in poetry. Maddox also has published a story collection, the anthologies Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania and Keystone Poetry (co-editor with Jerry Wemple, PSU Press), and 5 children’s books—including the middle-grade biography, A Man Named Branch: The True Story of Baseball's Great Experiment, about her great granduncle Branch Rickey, the General Manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers who helped Jackie Robinson break the color barrier in Major League Baseball. Assistant editor of Presence, she hosts Poetry Moment for WPSU-FM. For more information, see www.marjoriemaddox.com

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, a Liberian civil war survivor, is a poet, a memoirist, and writer. Some of her collections include, Praise Song for My Children: New and Selected Poems, When the Wanderers Come Home, Where the Road Turns, among others, and her most recently edited anthology, Breaking the Silence: Anthology of Liberian Literature is the first comprehensive volume of poetry out of Liberia since the nation’s independence. Her individual poems and memoir articles have appeared in such places as Harvard Review, Transition, Prairie Schooner, The New York Times Magazine, Poetry Magazine, and her poetry, has been translated into Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Hebrew, and Finnish. Her newest book, “Patricia Jabbeh Wesley: Collected Poems, 1998-2020,” is forthcoming from University of Nebraska Press in the spring, 2026. Patricia’s latest awards include a 2022 Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, a Levinson Prize from Poetry Foundation, and a 2021 Edward Stanley Prize from Prairie Schooner. She is Professor of English at Penn State.