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.^[1] Her book Drinking Coffee Elsewhere won the Commonwealth First Fiction Award and an ALEX award.^[2] It became a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner award and was selected for the Today Show Book Club by John Updike.^[3]

ZZ Packer
ZZ Packer at the 2009 Texas Book Festival.
Born	Zuwena Packer (1973-01-12) January 12, 1973 (age 52) Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
Period	2000-present

Early life and education

Born in Chicago, Illinois, Packer grew up in Atlanta, Georgia,^[4][1] and Louisville, Kentucky. "ZZ" was a childhood nickname; her given name is Zuwena.^[5][6] Packer enjoyed reading from a young age, visiting the local library daily with her mother in Atlanta.^[7] Her writing was published in the magazine Seventeen at the age of 19.^[5] Packer is a 1990 graduate of Seneca High School in Louisville, Kentucky.^[8]

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.^[9]

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."^[10]

"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.^[11]

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.^[7] 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".^[12] 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[13]
2003	Best American Short Stories 2003[14]
2008	New Stories from the South: The Year's Best[15]
2015	100 Years of the Best American Short Stories[16]

Other works

Year	Title	Publication
1999	Brownies	Harper's Magazine[17]
2000	Drinking Coffee Elsewhere	The New Yorker[18]
2002	The Ant of the Self	The New Yorker[19]
2002	Every Tongue Shall Confess	Ploughshares[20]
2002	The Stranger	The Washington Post Magazine[21]
2004	Derby Pie	The New York Times Magazine[22]
2004	An Interview with John Kerry	The Believer Magazine[23]
2004	I Was Black, and I Told Her	O, The Oprah Magazine[24]
2004	Losing My Religion	Salon[25]
2005	'Dr. King's Refrigerator': Thinking Outside the Icebox	The New York Times Magazine[26]
2005	Sorry, Not Buying	The American Prospect[27]
2007	Buffalo Soldiers	Granta[28]
2007	Pita Delicious	The Washington Post Magazine[29]
2007	Gideon	The Guardian[30]
2007	The Finishing Party: ZZ Packer's Writing Group	O, The Oprah Magazine[31]
2008	I want Obama to be daily proof that race is no barrier	The Guardian
2008	Saved to ‘Drafts’	Granta[32]
2008	Working the Reunion	The New York Times Magazine[33]
2009	No Polenta, No Cry	The New York Times Magazine[34]
2009	Remembering Updike: ZZ Packer	The New Yorker[35]
2009	A Finished Revolution?	The Oxford American[36]
2009	Confessions of a Shopaholic's Wife	Glamour[37]
2010	Dayward	The New Yorker[38]
2011	Ferraro's Barack Problem	HuffPost[39]
2012	Keeping it Weird in Austin, Texas	Smithsonian[40]
2013	It's Beyoncé's World and We're Just Living In It	Newsweek[41]
2017	Trump Talk: Your Translation Guide	The New Yorker[42]
2017	What to Expect When You're Expecting Fascism	The New Yorker[43]
2018	News of an ‘Outrage’ Used to Mean Something Very, Very Different	The New York Times Magazine[44]
2018	When Is ‘Civility’ a Duty, and When Is It a Trap?	The New York Times Magazine[45]
2019	July 30, 1866	The New York Times Magazine[46]
2019	Truth And Fiction	Port Magazine[47]
2020	Preacher of the New Antiracist Gospel	GQ[48]
2020	Sarah Cooper Doesn't Mimic Trump. She Exposes Him.	The New York Times Magazine[49]
2020	The Empty Facts of the Breonna Taylor Decision	The New Yorker[50]

Awards

Year	Title	Notes
1997	Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award	Winner
1999	Whiting Award[51]	Winner
1999	Bellingham Review Award	Winner
2003	Commonwealth Club of California Award[52]	Winner
2004	PEN/Faulkner Award	Finalist
2004	PEN/Hemingway Award	Finalist
2004	Alex Award[53]	Winner

Other honors

Year	Title
2006	5 under 35 honoree by the National Book Foundation[54]
2007	America's Best Young Novelists by Granta[55]
2007	Smithsonian Magazine's Young Innovators[56]
2010	The New Yorker magazine's "20 under 40" luminary fiction writers.[57]

Teaching

Year	Title
2007	Writer-in-Residence at the Tulane University English Department Creative Writing Program[58]
2008	Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at San Jose State University.[59]
2008	Creative Writing Faculty at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin[60]
2009	Writer-in-Residence at Vassar College[61]
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[62]
2012	Visiting Assistant Professor in English and Creative Writing at University of Houston[63]
2013	Creative Writing Assistant Professor at SFSU[64]
2015	Creative Writing Visiting Faculty at MIT[65]
2020	Creative Writing Faculty at Harvard University
2020	Creative Writing MFA Program at CUNY's Hunter College[66]
2023	Assistant Professor in the English Department at Vanderbilt University[67]

Fellowships

Year	Title
1999	Stegner Fellowship[68]
2002	MacDowell Fellowship[69]
2005	National Endowment for the Arts Grant
2005	Guggenheim Fellowship
2005	Montalvo Arts Center Lucas Artists Fellowship[70]
2007	San Francisco Writers' Grotto Fellowship[71]
2010	Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University[72]
2010	MacDowell Fellowship[69]
2013	Dobie Paisano Fellowship[4]
2014	Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard University[73]
2016	MacDowell Fellowship[69]
2018	W. E. B. Du Bois Institute Fellowship at Harvard University[74]
2018	Montalvo Arts Center Lucas Artists Fellowship[70]
2019	Montalvo Arts Center Lucas Artists Fellowship[70]
2020	Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs Fellowship at Brown University.[75]