ZZ Packer grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, and Louisville, Kentucky. "ZZ" was a childhood nickname; Packer's given name is Zuwena. She was recognized as a talented writer at an early age, publishing in Seventeen magazine at the age of 19. Packer is a 1990 graduate of Seneca High School, in Louisville, Kentucky. Packer attended Yale University, where she received a 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. She was named a Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University. Shortly thereafter, she entered the national literary scene with a high-profile appearance in the Debut Fiction issue of The New Yorker. Her short story in the issue became the title story in her collection Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, which was published to considerable acclaim. 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." The book was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, a New York Times Notable Book, and personally selected by John Updike for the Today Show Book Club. Her stories have also appeared in Best American Short Stories 2000 and 2003 and she edited New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, 2008.She also wrote a short story of Doris is Coming which is a story about an African American girl growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, in the early 1960s. In 2005, she was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction. She was a member of the San Francisco Writers' Grotto, a workspace co-operative that also includes Po Bronson, Julia Scheeres, Tom Barbash, Peter Orner, Jason Roberts, and Natalie Baszile, among others. In Spring 2007 she was named one of America's Best Young Novelists by Granta as well as one of Smithsonian Magazine's Young Innovators in October 2007. In June 2010, Packer was selected as one of The New Yorker magazine's "20 under 40" luminary fiction writers. "ZZ Packer’s Drinking Coffee Elsewhere is taught in creative writing courses across the country and with good reason," comments Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Colson Whitehead. "This short story collection is brimming with characters who are striving — to find themselves, to understand themselves, and to survive." Packer is currently working on a novel set during Reconstruction in the aftermath of the Civil War: "The subject is the Buffalo Soldiers; blacks who left the South, Louisiana in this case, and traveled to the West....You don't hear much about blacks in the West and I became really fascinated by them. I thought to justify my interest I had better write about them." A short excerpt from the novel was published in The New Yorker magazine's "20 under 40" issue. She was a literary contributor to The New York Times Magazine's 1619 Project spearheaded by journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones and edited by the magazine's editor-in-chief Jake Silverstein, writing historical fiction on the New Orleans massacre of 1866. She was Writer-in-Residence at the Tulane University English Department Creative Writing Program during the Fall 2007 semester. She became the Lurie Distinguished Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at San Jose State University during the Spring 2008 semester. She taught Creative Writing at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin in Fall 2008 and was a Vassar Writer-in-Residence in spring 2009. In spring 2010, she was the Visiting Professor of Creative Writing in the MFA Program of Creative Writing at Texas State University and became a Hodder fellow at Princeton University in Fall 2010. In 2011 she taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. In 2014, she became a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University and taught Creative Writing as Visiting Faculty at MIT from 2015-2016. She was a fellow at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University for the 2018-2019 academic year, and in 2020 became a Senior Fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University joining the ranks of Menaka Guruswamy, Heidi Heitkamp, Tom Perez, and Michael Steele. She has been contributing non-fiction to The New York Times Magazine since 2018.
