# ZZ Packer

Zuwena "ZZ" Packer (born January 12, 1973) is an American writer, primarily of works of short fiction.She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, a Whiting Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her book Drinking Coffee Elsewhere won the Commonwealth First Fiction Award and an ALEX award. It became a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner award and was selected for the Today Show Book Club by John Updike.

## Early life and education

Born in Chicago, Illinois, Packer grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, 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.

## 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."
"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. The novel-in-progress, The Thousands, "chronicles the lives of black, white, and Native American families shortly after the Civil War, through Reconstruction and the Indian Campaigns in the Southwest". She has been regularly contributing to The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker.

## Works
### Books

| Year | Title |
| 2003 | Drinking Coffee Elsewhere |

### Anthologies

| Year | Title |
| 2000 | Best American Short Stories 2000 |
| 2003 | Best American Short Stories 2003 |
| 2008 | New Stories from the South: The Year's Best |
| 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 Award | 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 Award | Winner |

### Other honors

| Year | Title |
| 2006 | 5 under 35 honoree by the National Book Foundation |
| 2007 | America's Best Young Novelists by Granta |
| 2007 | Smithsonian Magazine's Young Innovators |
| 2010 | The New Yorker magazine's "20 under 40" luminary fiction writers. |

## Teaching

| Year | Title |
| 2007 | Writer-in-Residence at the Tulane University English Department Creative Writing Program |
| 2008 | Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at San Jose State University. |
| 2008 | Creative Writing Faculty at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin |
| 2009 | Writer-in-Residence at Vassar College |
| 2010 | Visiting Professor of Creative Writing in the MFA Program of Creative Writing at Texas State University |
| 2011 | Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa |
| 2012 | Visiting Assistant Professor in English and Creative Writing at University of Houston |
| 2013 | Creative Writing Assistant Professor at SFSU |
| 2015 | Creative Writing Visiting Faculty at MIT |
| 2020 | Creative Writing Faculty at Harvard University |
| 2020 | Creative Writing MFA Program at CUNY's Hunter College |
| 2023 | Assistant Professor in the English Department at Vanderbilt University |

## Fellowships

| Year | Title |
| 1999 | Stegner Fellowship |
| 2002 | MacDowell Fellowship |
| 2005 | National Endowment for the Arts Grant |
| 2005 | Guggenheim Fellowship |
| 2005 | Montalvo Arts Center Lucas Artists Fellowship |
| 2007 | San Francisco Writers' Grotto Fellowship |
| 2010 | Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University |
| 2010 | MacDowell Fellowship |
| 2013 | Dobie Paisano Fellowship |
| 2014 | Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard University |
| 2016 | MacDowell Fellowship |
| 2018 | W. E. B. Du Bois Institute Fellowship at Harvard University |
| 2018 | Montalvo Arts Center Lucas Artists Fellowship |
| 2019 | Montalvo Arts Center Lucas Artists Fellowship |
| 2020 | Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs Fellowship at Brown University. |