Prose Writer

Phillis Wheatley Reading: 6:30 p.m., October 17, 2016, Jones Room (3rd floor, Woodruff Library)

Colloquium: 2:30-3:30 p.m., October 18, 2016, N301 Callaway Center

ZZ Packer was born in Chicago and raised in Atlanta and Louisville, Kentucky. She received her undergraduate degree from Yale, and afterward received degrees from Johns Hopkins and the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. She was a Stanford Wallace Stegner Fellow, a Princeton Lewis Center for the Arts Hodder Fellow, 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 and Best American Short Stories 2003. 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 Digital Online and The New Yorker Online. She has appeared on MSNBC as a Huffington Post contributor.

She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and the American Academy of Berlin Prize (postponed). Her collection of short 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 under the title Dayward.

As a professor of Creative Writing, she has taught the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Johns Hopkins, Tulane, Vassar, San Jose State University, The University of Houston, and Stanford University. She currently teaches at San Francisco State University.