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, September 28, at 3pm, poet and Penn State Altoona professor, Todd Davis, will be reading alongside his son, poet Noah Davis, at Tempest Studios (140 Kelly Alley).

Todd Davis is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Ditch Memory: New & Selected Poems and Coffin Honey, both published by Michigan State University Press. His work has won the Midwest Book Award, the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award, the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, the Chautauqua Editors Prize, and the Bloomsburg University Book Prize. His poems appear in such journals and magazines as American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, Missouri Review, North American Review, and Orion. For the past 22 years, he has lived along the Allegheny Front where he hunts, fishes, and forages for wild food. He is an emeritus fellow of the Black Earth Institute and teaches environmental studies and creative writing at Penn State Altoona.

Noah Davis’s second poetry collection, The Last Beast We Revel In, was published in April 2025 by CavanKerry Press. Davis’s first collection, Of This River, won the Wheelbarrow Emerging Poet Book Prize from Michigan State University’s Center for Poetry, and his poems and prose have appeared in The Sun, Orion, Best New Poets, The Year’s Best Sports Writing, Southern Humanities Review, Poet Lore, and North American Review among others. He also coedited the anthology A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia with Todd Davis and Carolyn G. Mahan that was published by University of Georgia Press. His work has been awarded a Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellowship at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and the Jean Ritchie Appalachian Literature Fellowship. Davis earned an MFA from Indiana University.