Since the society incorporated as a 501c3, Marshall Boswell, an English professor at Rhodes College, has been writing out checks (10-15 per month) and following up with phone calls to square things when a check wasn’t received or when there … Continue reading →

In perhaps its most competitive year, with at least a third of the 138 applicants being highly accomplished writers and artists, a trio of judges from The John Updike Society selected Taylor Brown as the recipient of the 2026 John … Continue reading →

Leslie Pietrzyk, whose first collection of short stories, The Angel on My Chest, won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, was selected over 193 applicants to be the 2025 John Updike Tucson Casitas Fellow. The fellowship consists of a $1000 prize … Continue reading →

Ethan Hemmati, a second-year British-Iranian doctoral candidate in American Literature at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, was named as the recipient of the 2025 Robert M. Luscher Scholarship for travel to research collections for a project involving John Updike. … Continue reading →

Every two years, The John Updike Society holds a conference at a site with an Updike connection to celebrate the literature and legacy of the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer. For every conference, the society awards competitive Schiff Travel Grants to scholars … Continue reading →

John Updike Society board member Robert M. Luscher recently retired from 22 years of teaching at the University of Nebraska at Kearney, but instead of a gold watch his daughters had something else in mind. To honor the decades their … Continue reading →