Salem, Massachusetts will be the site of The 9th Biennial John Updike Society Conference in April 13-15, 2027, and author-editor Jenny Jackson has agreed to be a keynote speaker.
Jackson is the New York Times bestselling author of The Shampoo Effect and Pineapple Street, a New York Times Notable Book. As Vice President and Executive Editor at Alfred A. Knopf (Updike’s publisher), she publishes a range of literary and commercial fiction, from Caro Claire Burke’s #1 New York Times bestseller Yesteryear to Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, to Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, to Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians trilogy. She counts Dolly Alderton, J. Courtney Sullivan, Chris Bohjalian, Ayobami Adebayo, Peter Heller, Katherine Heiny, Jennifer Close, Caroline O’Donoghue, Erin Morgenstern, and Lauren Fox among her writers. She is a graduate of Williams College and attended the Columbia Publishing Course. She grew up in Ipswich, Massachusetts, and lives in Brooklyn Heights with her family.
Especially relevant for Updike enthusiasts is that Jackson grew up in Ipswich while John Updike was living there and a local celebrity. She said her second novel was inspired by Updike’s scandalous novel Couples. “The natural beauty of Ipswich is so dramatic that it does feel like a place where you want to tell big stories,” she told the Local News.
The John Updike Society is an organization composed of professors, teachers, Updike family and friends, and readers who just love Updike and his works. To attend the conference you have to be a member, but it’s easy and inexpensive to join, and you can join at the same time as you register for the conference. A registration post is coming soon.
See Jackson’s Today interview
See Jackson’s “Overheard Staff Picks” Couples recommendation
Read Jackson’s take on “gossip”
Listen to Jackson’s Open Book with Jenna podcast: “From John Updike to Tom Brady: Unexpected Inspirations”
RTS, the Serbian public broadcast service, took note of two Serbian scholars of John Updike appearing on a panel at the recent American Literature Association conference in Chicago.
Dojčinović talked about what was covered in the panel on “Revisiting Olinger Stories (1964) at 60 and The Afterlife (1994) at 30: A Roundtable,” while Glintić talked about what it meant for his thesis-in-progress.
John Updike Society board member Sylvie Mathé was profiled in the series “Persistence of Character — Major interview: Archaeology of a journey” in e-Rea, electronic journal of studies on the English-speaking world. The series, published in French, tracks the breadth of an entire career of distinguished intellectuals, including early influences. An English translation exists in PDF form, but in a file to big to upload and no link to share. Here is the link to a French version online: 
Mathé talks about the full trajectory of her career, including the experience of spending her senior year in high school in Rock Island, Ill. “Compared to my final year in French, the amount of work was nothing like it was, nor the demands of the homework,” she told the interviewer. She shared that her host family was “extremely puritanical,” with the mother “surprised, even horrified, that I had read texts by Hemingway, or Sanctuary by Faulkner…It must be said that 1968 in a small town in Illinois was still the 50s. It had nothing to do with what was happening on campuses at the same time, with women’s lib, demonstrations against the Vietnam War, for civil rights, etc.” In summary, “Let’s say that compared to my final year in French, or my life in France, which was essentially focused on high school, work and success, it was a much more varied life, more entertaining…I was doing things I had never done before: I was caught up in the rhythm, I went to matches according to the football, basketball, baseball seasons,” and she dated, went to parties where there was drinking and marijuana brownies, and was generally inducted into American culture.
Mathé’s introduction to John Updike came when she went to Oxford and studied “Puritanism in John Updike’s Fiction” with Jeanne-Marie Santraud, “who was the only Americanist at Paris IV.” She would go on to write her master’s thesis on Updike and compose a monograph for the American Voices series edited by Marc Chénetier titled John Updike: Nostalgia for America.
Sue Norton, Lecturer of English in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Technological University Dublin, Ireland, has accepted an invitation to join The John Updike Society Board of Directors. Her appointment is effective immediately.