Poetry and Fiction Series: ZZ Packer September 16, 2010

When: Thursday, September 16, 2010 • 7:30 pm

Where: Blodgett House

ZZ PackerZZ (short for Zuwena) Packer’s short story collection, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (Riverhead Books, 2003), is a New York Times Notable Book, a PEN/Faulkner finalist, and a selection by John Updike for the Today Show Book Club. Her stories have been read on NPR’s Selected Shorts and published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Story, Ploughshares, Zoetrope and The Best American Short Stories 2000 and 2004

Her nonfiction has been featured in the The Washington Post Magazine, New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The American Prospect, Essence, O, The Believer and Salon. She is a contributor to The Huffington Post, and has appeared frequently as a commentator on MSNBC and NPR’s Talk of the Nation.

She is the recipient of a Whiting Writers Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. She was recently named one of America’s Best Young novelists by Granta Magazine and one of America’s Young Innovators by Smithsonian Magazine. In June 2010, she was chosen by The New Yorker as one of its "20 Under 40" — young fiction writers whom the magazine's editors believe "are, or will be, key to their generation."