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ZZ Packer on Muck Rack

ZZ Packer

(She/Her)
Covers:  Books, Literature, Narrative, Voice in Fiction, Race, Reconstruction, Breonna Taylor, Louisville, KY, the Buffalo Soldiers
Author of Drinking Coffee Elsewhere. Guggenheim, National Book Award 5 Under 35, PEN, NEA, @NewYorker @NYTMag @WME @VanderbiltU #1619Project #BreonnaTaylor

ZZ Packer’s Biography

ZZ Packer's fiction has appeared in The New Yorker since 2000, and she's additionally published fiction in Harper’s, STORY, Ploughshares, GRANTA, Zoetrope All-Story, Best American Short Stories, Best Non-Required Reading and, most recently, 100 Years of The Best American Short Stories and The New York Times Magazine's "The 1619 Project."

She has been contributing non-fiction to The New York Times Magazine since 2000. Her non-fiction has also appeared in The Washington Post Magazine, The American Prospect, The Oxford American, The Guardian, The New York Times Book Review, The Believer, Essence, O Magazine, GQ, PORT, and online at Salon, Newsweek, and The New Yorker.* She has appeared on MSNBC as a Huffington Post contributor as well as the BBC World News.

She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award, a Whiting Award, a Commonwealth First Fiction Award, an ALEX Award, an American Academy of Berlin Prize (postponed) and was a National Book Award 5 under 35 winner.

GRANTA Magazine named her one of "America’s Best Young Novelists" and Smithsonian Magazine named her one of "America's Best Young Innovators."

She has been a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University and a Hutchins Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African-American Research at the W.E.B. DuBois Institute at Harvard University. She was a Lilian Golay Knafel Fellow at The Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and a Senior Fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.

She has been a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist and has taught at Harvard, MIT, Brown, Stanford, Tulane, San Francisco State University, the Michener Center at University of Texas at Austin, Johns Hopkins, and Hunter College.

She is the author of Drinking Coffee Elsewhere and editor of New Stories from the South, 2008. She is a graduate of Yale University and completed post-graduate work at Johns Hopkins and Stanford. In addition, she worked under James Alan McPherson and Marilynne Robinson at the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.