On Sunday, March 22, at 3pm, Hometown Voices, your local reading & performance series, will host an event featuring fiction writer and live storyteller, Teresa Hamilton, and poet, Melissa C. Johnson, at Tempest Studios, located downtown at 140 Kelly Alley.

This event free and open to the public. Parking in the Fraser Deck (located just above Tempest Studios) is free on most Sundays. Come enjoy local writers and support your creative community!

Teresa Hamilton is a writer and storyteller shaped by her Southern roots and her background as a journalist. She writes about small-town life in Arkansas, exploring place, memory, community, and the influence of Delta Blues music. Her first short story, “Public Apology,” appeared in the Spring 2025 issue of The Killens Review of Arts and Letters. New to fiction writing, she approaches storytelling as a space of discovery, carrying the sensibilities of reporting and lived experience into imagined worlds. She teaches first-year writing at Penn State University.

Melissa C. Johnson is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Looking Twice at the World and Cancer Voodoo. Her poetry has also appeared in Borderlands, Waccamaw, Diode, Kakalak, The Connecticut Review, Farmer's Market, The Potomac Review, Nelle, Verse Daily, American Life in Poetry, and elsewhere. She studied creative writing and 20th-Century British Literature at the University of South Carolina and has been a faculty member and administrator at Newberry College and Virginia Commonwealth University. In 2016, she was a contributor at the Sewanee Writer's Conference. She currently serves as Associate Vice President and Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education at Penn State and lives in Boalsburg with her husband Joseph Schaub and their three beloved cats.

For questions or additional publicity materials, email Rachael Wiley at rwiley@psu.edu.