The general membership elected Matthew Shipe to fill the open seat vacated when Jack De Bellis stepped down. Shipe begins a three-year term, starting immediately.

Shipe recently won the Emerging Writers Prize given by The John Updike Review, and he has been a member of the society since 2010. A lecturer and coordinator of Advanced Writing at Washington University in St. Louis, he wrote his dissertation on John Updike’s collected short fiction, and his work has appeared in The John Updike Review, Philip Roth Studies, Critical Insights: Raymond Carver (Salem Press, 2013), Roth and Celebrity (Lexington Books, 2013), and Perspectives on Barry Hannah (University Press of Mississippi, 2007).