Below are a variety of items about upcoming events and other news notes on the campus of Youngstown State University:

• Students plant seeds of hope on Youngstown’s North Side
• Akron professor named new head of NEOMFA
• Student presents paper at Appalachian Studies meeting
• YSU faculty/staff awards, presentations, publications

Calendar
Tuesday, June 30, 10 a.m. YSU hosts a news conference to announce a significant donation to the university’s Centennial Capital Campaign. The news conference will be on the southwest corner of the parking lot behind Williamson Hall, at the corner of Phelps Street and Rayen Avenue and adjacent to the construction site for the new Williamson College of Business Administration.

Students plant seeds of hope on Youngstown’s North Side
When the Help Hotline Community Center wanted to plant a garden behind its shelter on Fifth Avenue in Youngstown, YSU student Suzanne Locke knew the perfect group to pull it off.

Locke asked 11 of her fellow students in her communications foundation course to join together and plant the garden to help homeless people at the shelter.

“There is something very rewarding about planting and growing your own food,” Locke said. “It brings a great level of self–worth and accomplishment for the people that use the shelter."

The project fits with the service–learning requirement of the YSU communication foundations course, taught by assistant professor Adam Earnhardt. The course requires student to find a solution or engage in a solution to a problem 
plaguing Youngstown.  

Students solicited local businesses for donations, such as garden tools, soil and mulch, plants and flowers.

“What''s interesting is that most of these students didn''t know each other until two or three weeks ago – they had never met,” Earnhardt said. “They come from varied backgrounds, majoring in everything from jazz performance to computer science. But they bonded over this idea that they might really be able to help someone have a better life."

Students participating in the project were Locke, Danielle Long, Amy Gregory, Edward Palestro, Danielle Gorby, Brandon DeGennaro, Mike Meszaros, Samantha Adams, Angeline Sodomora, Sarah Navarra, Sam Blakeslee and Randa Hamayel.

Sponsors included Home Depot (Austintown, Warren, Boardman), Wal–Mart (Boardman) Briel''s Flowers (Youngstown), Subway (Youngstown), Aqua America, Wilm's Greenhouse (Franklin Square) and Turning Technologies (Youngstown).

Akron professor named new head of NEOMFA

The executive committee of the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing has elected poet Mary Biddinger, assistant professor of English at the University of Akron, as director for a three–year term beginning July 1.

NEOMFA is offered at Youngstown State University and three other campuses — University of Akron, Cleveland State University and Kent State University.

Biddinger follows Maggie Anderson, poet and KSU professor of English, who served as NEOMFA director from 2006 to 2009. The office of the NEOMFA will rotate from KSU to Akron for the length of Biddinger’s term.

Biddinger has been a member of the NEOMFA faculty since 2005 and has served for the past four years as the NEOMFA coordinator for the University of Akron campus. She holds a bachelor of arts degree in English and creative writing from the University of Michigan, a master of fine arts degree in poetry from Bowling Green State University, and a Ph.D. in English, Program for Writers, from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

She is the author of Prairie Fever (Steel Toe Books, 2007). Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in 32 Poems, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Gulf Coast, The Laurel Review, Memorious, Ninth Letter, North American Review, /nor, Third Coast, and many other journals.

Biddinger also serves as editor of the Akron Series in Poetry and is on the Open Competition Editorial Committee for the Cleveland State University Poetry Center.  In 2007, she founded the independent literary magazine Barn Owl Review, which released its second issue in the spring of 2009.

The NEOMFA/Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing is the only MFA consortium program in the country, with an innovative new model for the standard 48 credit hour graduate degree program in creative writing. The program offers specializations in fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, playwriting, and literary translation.

For more information on the NEOMFA program, visit www.ysu.edu/neomfa.

Student presents paper at Appalachian Studies meeting

In 2001, Shannon Grantz earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology and political science from YSU. But two years ago, when her youngest child left for college, Grantz decided to return to campus, this time to pursue a certificate in historic preservation. 

Now, she has decided to put in the extra time to work towards a master’s degree as well, and she’s already making a name for herself in the history field.

This spring, she presented a paper at the 32^nd annual meeting of the Appalachian Studies Association at Shawnee State University in Portsmouth, Ohio, a national conference attended by scholars in various fields who are studying the history and culture of the Appalachian Region. Her paper, “Women’s Work: From the Farm to the Coal Camp in Appalachian Ohio,” compared the lives of women in pre–industrialization farm towns to the lives of women living in established coal towns.

“The transition from farm life, which demanded independence, to coal towns, which necessitated a dependent lifestyle, was a profound change for the women of Appalachia,” Grantz said. “They learned to adjust to a different way of living while retaining many of the same cultural traditions as their ancestors.”

Grantz’s trip, which was funded by the YSU Provost’s Office and an Appalachian Studies Association scholarship, was one she said she won’t forget.

“It was a wonderful experience,” she said. “Everyone I met, from an editor of a book publishing company to college professors, was very kind and supportive, and they all offered me several ideas for further research.”

A resident of North Lima, Grantz said that, after graduating from YSU, she plans to work towards a Ph.D. in history with a focus on Appalachian and architectural history. At the same time, she hopes to be able to employ her expertise to help market historical buildings in the Mahoning Valley.

“I would like to take the knowledge I have gained in the historic preservation program and apply it to the local real estate market, helping people buy and sell the wonderful old buildings and homes that we have in the Youngstown area,” she said.

YSU faculty/staff awards, presentations, publications
David Stout, professor and Andrews Chair, Accounting and Finance, attended the Academy of Business Education Conference and presented two papers, “The Smith Company: A Case on Capital Budgeting and Real Options,” and “Service–Based CVP Problems for Use in Accounting and Finance Courses.” He also served as moderator of Session 56: Accounting & MIS, in Hilton Head, S.C.

Mark F. Toncar, associate professor, Marketing, and Donna M. Walsh, instructor, Marketing, presented “An Empirical Investigation of Academic Dishonesty and its Antecedents Among MBA Students” at the Atlantic Marketing Association Annual Meeting in Savannah, Ga.

Leland W. Knauf, professor emeritus, Mathematics, was awarded the Christofferson–Fawcett Award for Lifetime Contribution to Mathematics Education at the annual meeting of the Ohio Council of Teachers of Mathematics.

Bradley Shellito, associate professor, Geography, co–authored an article entitled “Spatial Interpolation and Image–Integrative Geostatistical Prediction of Mosquito Vectors for Arboviral Surveillance” that was published in Geocarto International.

Paul R. Carr, assistant professor, Educational Foundations, Research, Technology and Leadership, had an article entitled “Youth culture, the mass media, and democracy” published in  Academic Exchange Quarterly. 

Denise A. Narcisse, assistant professor, Sociology and Anthropology, presented the paper “Pedagogy and Closing the Achievement Gap: Using Life History Projects to Engage, Motivate, and Teach Minority Students” at the Association of Applied and Clinical Sociology annual conference in Jacksonville, Fla.