D'YOUVILLE UNIVERSITY 53 52 D'MENSIONS MAGAZINE FALL 2025 ALUMNI NEWS Thomas DeLuca (’76) was elected supreme president of the 20,000-member Knights of St. John International at its convention in Buffalo in 2024. DeLuca has been an active Knight for 56 years, largely in leadership roles. He had served as the group’s first vice president for a decade before his election to president. Joyce Markiewicz (’80 BSN) was named to Buffalo Business First’s Power 200 Women list for 2025. Markiewicz is chief executive officer for Catholic Health Buffalo. Cathy Zacher ('95, PT) is the director of rehab services at UR/ Jones Memorial hospital and currently serves as secretary of the APTA New York. Emily Jerge ('13, MSN) was named one of Buffalo Business First's "40 Under 40" recipients in November 2023. Jerge is the former director of nursing simulation and clinical practice at D'Youville. Jessica Trainer (’17 BSN) was named a clinical leader at Upstate Medical University last December. Trainer began her career at St. Joe’s and joined Upstate in 2020. She served as charge nurse and preceptor in the Burn ICU. Trey Boling (’22, ’24) married Zoe Oliver in August at Brinksberry Hollow in Wilson, NY. After a one year administrative fellowship at Rochester Regional Health, Boling was named practice manager of primary care in July. Dr. Matthew Smith (’14, ’17 DPT) was honored with two American Physical Therapy Association awards: the APTA NY Western District Service to the District Award in 2024 and the APTA NY Chapter Appreciation Award in 2025. Smith currently serves as lead therapist with Associated Physical & Occupational Therapy. Smith joined the faculty at D’Youville University as an adjunct professor in 2023. SEND US YOUR NEWS! D'Mensions Magazine wants to publish your wedding, engagement and birth announcements, promotions and anything else you feel like sharing! Email Reneé Orr, director of alumni engagement, at [email protected]. Please be sure all photos are high resolution! 1940-2025 REMEMBERING OLGA KARMAN Olga Karman, a leading figure in the Buffalo writing community for nearly five decades, died on July 9 after a brief illness. A poet, memoirist, fiction writer and community leader, Karman was a professor of Spanish language and literature for over two decades at D’Youville and served as the college’s director of community affairs. She was born in Havana, Cuba, and graduated from the distinguished Ruston Academy of Havana in 1958. When Fidel Castro’s regime came to power in 1959, she left Cuba and moved to the United States to marry her American fiancé. Feeling isolated and removed from her culture as a young mother in rural Connecticut, she enrolled in Connecticut College, where she graduated Summa Cum Laude in 1966, and became a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. She subsequently was awarded a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to Harvard University, where she earned her PhD in Latin American Literature in 1976. Her PhD dissertation was on the Cuban writer José Lezama Lima’s neo- Baroque novel Paradiso. Her poetry collections include Adios (Just Buffalo Literary Center, 1984) and Border Crossing (The Buffalo Press, 1990). In 1997, she returned to visit Cuba after 37 years. While there she gathered material for her much-praised memoir Scatter My Ashes Over Havana (Pureplay Press, 2006) and her fiction collection A Woman of Some Years (2010). Olga taught Spanish at Nichols School, and then was a professor at D’Youville for 27 years. She taught Spanish and Spanish for the health professions, and worked from the beginning to create Leonardo Da’Vinci High School in partnership with D’Youville. She spent her later years as a certified Spanish language interpreter for the New York State Board of Parole. Olga served on the Board of Directors of Just Buffalo Literary Center from 2011 to 2018. She continued writing poems and short works of prose and fiction until her death. — thebuffalohive.com
