With a few exceptions, the working class is absent from the mainstream media. Starting in 2007, the Center for Working-Class Studies has partnered with YSU's Journalism Program to develop opportunities for student journalists to report and write about issues facing working people. The centerpiece of that effort is a series of reporting field trips. In spring 2007, students visited Sago, West Virginia, to talk to people one year after one of the nation's most deadly mining disasters. In December, another group spent several days in the Allentown, Pennsylvania area, writing stories comparing that community's economic response to the collapse of steel with the Mahoning Valley's experience. The students' stories have appeared in the local newspaper and on local television stations.

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During the 2006-2007 academic year, Sherry Linkon and Alyssa Lenhoff coordinated a project to create an exhibit and report on how work is changing in the Mahoning Valley. "Worker Portraits: Faces of Strength" involved Youngstown State University (YSU) journalism students in writing profiles of individual workers, and CWCS affiliate Rosemary D'Apolito conducted research on demographic patterns. In April 2007, the resulting exhibit opened at the Youngstown Historical Center, featuring a dozen profiles, with beautiful photographs by Steve Cagan, and an accompanying booklet. We hope to take the exhibit on tour around the Mahoning Valley over the next two years.

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These sites provide a wide range of resources -- bibliographies, lists of writers and works, links to texts, and collections of images, sound files, and documents.

Featured authors include Raymond Carver, Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, and John Steinbeck.

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