The Creative Writing Program invites you to a fiction reading with ZZ Packer.

ZZ Packer was born in Chicago and raised in Atlanta and Louisville, Kentucky. She graduated from Yale, and afterward received degrees from Johns Hopkins and The Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. She has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, a Hodder Fellow at Princeton, and a Lillian Golay Knafel fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. 

Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Story, Ploughshares, GRANTA, Zoetrope All-Story, Best American Short Stories 2000, Best American Short Stories 2003 and 100 Years of The Best American Short Stories.   

Her non-fiction has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine, The Believer, The American Prospect, The Oxford American, The Guardian, The New York Times Book Review, Newsweek Online and The New Yorker Online. She has appeared on the BBC World and on MSNBC as a Huffington Post contributor. 

She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and the American Academy of Berlin Prize. Her collection of stories Drinking Coffee Elsewhere won the Commonwealth First Fiction Award, an ALEX Award and was a National Book Award 5 under 35 winner. It became a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2004, and was selected for the Today Show Book Club by John Updike. 

ZZ Packer is editor of New Short Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, 2008. She is at work on a novel about the Reconstruction and Buffalo Soldiers entitled The Thousands, an excerpt of which appeared in The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40 Fiction Issue” and The 1619 Project.

She has taught creative writing at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, The Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin, Tulane University, Stanford University and Johns Hopkins. She’s most recently taught writing at MIT and Williams College, where she was also a writer-in-residence, as well as Harvard University and Vanderbilt, where she currently teaches in the MFA program.