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

Professor leads workshop on tracing family histories

Donna DeBlasio, director of Youngstown State University’s Center for Applied History, will lead a free workshop on Saturday, May 30, on using historical sources to research family history.

The workshop, called “Be Your Own Historian,” will be 10 a.m. to noon in the meeting room of the main branch of the Public Library of Youngstown and Mahoning County.

DeBlasio will show participants how to use materials such as census records, city directories, and other public documents to learn about when family members moved to the Mahoning Valley, where they lived, their occupations, and more.

The workshop is free and open to the public.

This program is part of a series of workshops sponsored by Steel Valley Voices, aimed at helping area residents explore and preserve the history of their families and communities. The project aims to collect, preserve, and celebrate the ethnic and racial diversity of the Mahoning Valley.

Along with sponsoring workshops to teach area residents about strategies to research and share their own histories, Steel Valley Voices hosts an online collection featuring letters, photographs, recipes, audio and video recordings, and more, all available online at www.steelvalleyvoices.com.

The project currently has collections from the African–American, Irish, Italian, and Romanian communities, as well as a section on inter–ethnic weddings. Sections are currently being developed for the Slovak and Mexican communities, with more to come. Area residents may submit materials for the collection online, by visiting the site at www.steelvalleyvoices.com, or by contacting Sherry Linkon, 330–941–2977, or by e–mail at sllinkon@ysu.edu. 

YSU Board of Trustees schedules June meetings
The Youngstown State University Board of Trustees will meet in June on the following schedule 

Tuesday, June 2, 2009, Kilcawley Center, Presidential Suite
8 a.m., Executive Committee.
8:30 a.m., Academic and Student Affairs Committee.
9:30 a.m., Audit Subcommittee.
10:30 a.m., Internal Affairs Committee.
11:30 a.m., Ad Hoc Subcommittee for Negotiations and Collective Bargaining.
Noon, Lunch (Kilcawley Center, Jones Room).
12:30 p.m., Ad Hoc Subcommittee on University Policy Statement/Procedures Review.

Friday, June 5, 2009, Kilcawley Center, Bresnahan I and II
11 a.m. to 4 p.m., Board Retreat. 

Friday, June 19, 2009
1 p.m. , Finance and Facilities Committee (tentative), Tod Hall, President’s Conference Room.
3 p.m., Board Meeting, Tod Hall, Board of Trustees’ Meeting Room.

Faculty member’s poetry book celebrates ‘others’

Mindy Kirchner of Liberty, Ohio, wanted to give a voice to society’s underrepresented members. She hoped to write poetry for the everyman, in a conversational tone and free of “abstractions and pretentiousness that are sometimes associated with contemporary poetry.”

So, she penned her 18–poem chapbook, “Song of the Rest of Us,” which recognizes people who Kirchner, a limited–service faculty member in Youngstown State University’s English Department, calls society’s “others.”

“[‘Song of the Rest of Us’] addresses the ‘other’ in society, including the working class, the non–academic, and anyone who, for whatever reason, is overlooked or ignored by the mainstream,” she said.

Winner of the 2007 Wick Poetry Chapbook Competition, Kirchner’s collection of poems was recently published by Kent State University Press. The 2007 Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts graduate is excited about the career opportunities that publishing her work may bring.

“I feel extremely lucky to have this chapbook published,” Kirchner said. “Not only does this mean my work will be read more widely, but that I will also become more marketable as a professor of poetry.”

Although “Song of the Rest of Us” was Kirchner’s first published collection of poetry, she has published poems in numerous journals and her poem, “In Medias Res,” won the 2008 Whiskey Island Poetry Prize, a national contest. Three poems from Kirchner’s chapbook are featured in “The Next of Us is About to Be Born,” Wick Poetry Center’s 25^th anniversary anthology.

Kirchner, who earned a bachelor’s degree from Penn State University, said she is sending out full–length book manuscripts and continuing to work on new poems when she is not teaching. “Song of the Rest of Us” can be purchased online at http://upress.kent.edu/books.

YSU faculty/staff awards, presentations, publications
Adam Earnheardt, assistant professor, Communication, was named executive director of the Ohio Communication Association. The OCA is a statewide professional organization of communications teachers, professors and scholars in high schools, colleges and universities.

Ying Wang, assistant professor, Marketing, presented “Chinese Perspectives in Intercultural Communication” at the International Communication Association Annual Conference in Montreal, Canada. Wang also presented “Romanian Consumers’ Perceptions and Attitudes Toward Online Advertising” at the American Marketing Association Annual Conference in San Diego, Calif. He also presented “Exploring Sense of Virtual Community and Its Relationship with Users’ Content Production in the Web 2.0 Context” at the Global Academy of Business and Economic Research Conference.

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.

Zbigniew Piotrowski, professor, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, was invited to serve as a Scientific Committee member of the International Conference on Mathematical Sciences in Ystanbul, Turkey.