ZZ Packer

ZZ Packer brings the world into focus with wit, defiance, and a sharp eye for the uneasy truths beneath everyday encounters. Her debut short story collection, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and won the Commonwealth First Fiction Award and an Alex Award. In the years since, she has published widely in The New Yorker, Granta, and Best American Short Stories. Her work has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and honors from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Born in Chicago, Packer honed her craft at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she studied under James Alan McPherson and Marilynne Robinson, before continuing as a Stegner Fellow at Stanford. Her literary career has been marked not only by her boundary-pushing fiction but also by her contributions as an essayist, critic, and teacher at institutions including Stanford, Princeton, and now Vanderbilt University. She also served as the editor of New Stories from the South in 2008.