ZZ Packer

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 and Marilynne Robinson.^[9][10]

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."^[11]

"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.^[12]

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".^[13] She has been regularly contributing to The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker.

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.^[10][14][15] As of 2025, she is Assistant Professor of English at the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt University^[16] and teaches Advanced Narrative Techniques on the American Short Fiction MFA for All.^[17]

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.^[14][15][16]