Zuwena "ZZ" Packer (born January 12, 1973) is an Americans writer, primarily of works of Short story, and teacher. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, a Whiting Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Early life and education
Born in
Chicago, Packer grew up in
Atlanta,
and Louisville, Kentucky. "ZZ" was a childhood nickname; her given name is Zuwena.
Packer enjoyed reading from a young age, visiting the local library daily with her mother in Atlanta.
Her writing was published in the magazine
Seventeen at the age of 19.
Packer is a 1990 graduate of Seneca High School in Louisville, Kentucky.
Packer attended Yale University, receiving her BA in 1994. Her graduate work included an MA at Johns Hopkins University in 1995 and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop of the University of Iowa in 1999, where she was mentored by James Alan McPherson and Marilynne Robinson.
Writing career
Her work was first published in the Debut Fiction issue of
The New Yorker in 2000. Her short story in the issue became the title story in her collection
Drinking Coffee Elsewhere. As
Publishers Weekly put it, "this debut short story collection is getting the highest of accolades from the
New York Times,
Harper's, the
New Yorker and most every other branch of the literary criticism tree."
[ "Drinking Coffee Elsewhere", Barnes & Noble.]
"ZZ Packer’s Drinking Coffee Elsewhere is taught in creative writing courses nationwide and with good reason. This short story collection is brimming with characters who are striving to find themselves, to understand themselves, and to survive", commented novelist Colson Whitehead.
In an interview when Packer was a Radcliffe Fellow, in 2015, she reported that she working on a novel set during Reconstruction in the aftermath of the Civil War.
Teaching and fellowships
Packer has held teaching posts at Stanford University, where she was a Jones Lecturer, the Michener Center at the University of Texas,
Vassar College, and San Francisco University.
As of 2025, she is Assistant Professor of English at the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt University
and teaches Advanced Narrative Techniques on the American Short Fiction MFA for All.
She has been the recipient of a Dobie Paisano Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, a Hutchings Fellowhip at Harvard University, a Knafel Fellowship at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and a Whiting Writers Award.
Works
Books
| +
!Year
!Title |
| 2003 | Drinking Coffee Elsewhere |
Anthologies
| +
!Year
!Title |
| 2000 | Best American Short Stories 2000[The Best American Short Stories 2000] |
| 2003 | Best American Short Stories 2003[Best American Short Stories 2003] |
| 2008 | New Stories from the South: The Year's Best[David Austin Gura, "ZZ Packer's edition of Southern stories straddles old and new Dixie" , Indy Week. August 20, 2008.] |
| 2015 | 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories |
Other works
| +
!Year
!Title
!Publication |
| 1999 | Brownies | Harper's Magazine |
| 2000 | Drinking Coffee Elsewhere | The New Yorker |
| 2002 | The Ant of the Self | The New Yorker |
| 2002 | Every Tongue Shall Confess | Ploughshares |
| 2002 | The Stranger | The Washington Post Magazine |
| 2004 | Derby Pie | The New York Times Magazine |
| 2004 | An Interview with John Kerry | The Believer Magazine |
| 2004 | I Was Black, and I Told Her | O, The Oprah Magazine |
| 2004 | Losing My Religion | Salon |
| 2005 | 'Dr. King's Refrigerator': Thinking Outside the Icebox | The New York Times Magazine |
| 2005 | Sorry, Not Buying | The American Prospect |
| 2007 | Buffalo Soldiers | Granta |
| 2007 | Pita Delicious | The Washington Post Magazine |
| 2007 | Gideon | The Guardian |
| 2007 | The Finishing Party: ZZ Packer's Writing Group | O, The Oprah Magazine |
| 2008 | I want Obama to be daily proof that race is no barrier | The Guardian |
| 2008 | Saved to ‘Drafts’ | Granta |
| 2008 | Working the Reunion | The New York Times Magazine |
| 2009 | No Polenta, No Cry | The New York Times Magazine |
| 2009 | Remembering Updike: ZZ Packer | The New Yorker |
| 2009 | A Finished Revolution? | The Oxford American |
| 2009 | Confessions of a Shopaholic's Wife | Glamour |
| 2010 | Dayward | The New Yorker |
| 2011 | Ferraro's Barack Problem | HuffPost |
| 2012 | Keeping it Weird in Austin, Texas | Smithsonian |
| 2013 | It's Beyoncé's World and We're Just Living In It | Newsweek |
| 2017 | Trump Talk: Your Translation Guide | The New Yorker |
| 2017 | What to Expect When You're Expecting Fascism | The New Yorker |
| 2018 | News of an ‘Outrage’ Used to Mean Something Very, Very Different | The New York Times Magazine |
| 2018 | When Is ‘Civility’ a Duty, and When Is It a Trap? | The New York Times Magazine |
| 2019 | July 30, 1866 | The New York Times Magazine |
| 2019 | Truth And Fiction | Port Magazine |
| 2020 | Preacher of the New Antiracist Gospel | GQ |
| 2020 | Sarah Cooper Doesn't Mimic Trump. She Exposes Him. | The New York Times Magazine |
| 2020 | The Empty Facts of the Breonna Taylor Decision | The New Yorker |
Awards
| +
!Year
!Title
!Notes |
| 1997 | Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award | Winner |
| 1999 | Whiting Awards | Winner |
| 1999 | Bellingham Review Award | Winner |
| 2003 | Commonwealth Club of California Award | Winner |
| 2004 | PEN/Faulkner Award | Finalist |
| 2004 | PEN/Hemingway Award | Finalist |
| 2004 | Alex Awards | Winner |
Other honors
| +
!Year
!Title |
| 2006 | 5 under 35 honoree by the National Book Foundation |
| 2007 | America's Best Young Novelists by Granta[http://www.granta.com/Magazine/97October 2007] |
| 2007 | Smithsonian Magazine's Young Innovators[Tessa Decarlo, "Comedienne of Manners" , Smithsonian magazine, October 2007.] |
| 2010 | The New Yorker magazine's "20 under 40" luminary fiction writers. |
External links
