📚 ALA 2026 Roundtable: Thoughts

In May 2026, I was featured on a roundtable sponsored by the Roth Society that discussed mentoring in author societies. Joined by the Fitzgerlad, Joyce Carol Oates, and John Updike societies, we talked about the future of author societies in the 2020s and beyond.

Below are my remarks in full:

          Interestingly, I can say I owe the fact that I am walking this path with these two societies to the same person--Jim Schiff. I would hate to inflate his ego anymore, but I must unfortunately admit the truth here. Jim was a professor of mine as I pursued my PhD, and in one of his courses I read The Human Stain. At that point in my career I had very limited knowledge of Roth. I had read a couple of his books, and I knew a few short stories. I think it was Goodbye, Columbus and American Pastoral that I knew best at that point, but the memory gets shakier with each year as I dive further into his work. But something about The Human Stain really spoke to me in a way that American Pastoral did for so many, unlike myself. (Don’t worry I’m not an AP hater, it just didn’t hit me the way others often say it hit them, apologies.) But Stain, this was different for me somehow. I had to write about it. When I received feedback from Jim on my essay, he told me something I wasn’t ever sure I was going to hear: “Joey, this is publishable.”

          Those four words carried me through a lot of tough times. He encouraged me to submit to Philip Roth Studies. The big scary editor at the time, Aimee, suggested, before sending it out for review, that I include some other scholarship she thought the reviewers would expect to see, such a helpful and kind thing for an editor to do for a second-year PhD student. (Not to mention she wrote back to me in only an jhour and a half!) Then, after review, she suggested I submit it for consideration for the Siegel McDaniel Award. When it eventually won, Miri reached out to me and asked if I’d like to come to ALA--the society had an open spot on their panel. I had never been invited to anything like this before. I had been to a conference or two but this was new. Somebody wanted me there.

          At that conference, I went to Jim’s panel to support him as he had been supporting me so graciously. It was there that I met many of the Updike scholars in this room. Jim then, a few months later, suggested I submit to the Updike Review. And I eventually won the Emerging Writers Prize. 

          At the risk of that all sounding like I’m tooting my own horn, I want to emphasize how any of it happened at all. Yes, I wrote the essays and delivered the presentations but every step of the way somebody from one of these incredible societies reached out to me and said “I think you are capable of doing this--wanna give it a go?”

          Support isn’t just praise when something is done or even encouragement when something is in progress. Support is providing the opportunity in the first place. I am a prime example of how this works, because neither Roth nor Updike were authors that I had on my radar. I was going to be the only Jewish American literature scholar who merely wrote about Roth on occasion when pressed, and now look at me: I’m the newsletter editor for the Roth Society, I put together the annotated bibliography for Roth studies, and I attend every Roth panel we put on, trying to present every time. Nobody ever made me feel less than, either, when I told them my interest in Roth was minor at the start. 

           Without people asking me if I wanted to give things a shot, I wouldn’t have ever wound up where I am today. I don’t doubt that I would have accomplished a lot on a different path, too, but this path that the Roth Society guided me towards is a path where I have a group of people who I know I can count on and turn to. A group of people who do not just believe in me and my future but are invested in it. This is the feeling that I have had since I joined the Roth Society, and it's the feeling I hope to impart to future students who were like me for decades to come. And it’s this mindset that I think we need to pursue and practice.