ZZ Packer

2014–2015
Fiction & Poetry
Lillian Gollay Knafel Fellow
San Francisco State University

Photo by Tony Rinaldo

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

ZZ Packer is a graduate of Yale University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is an assistant professor at San Francisco State University whose interests include creative writing, post-classical narrative theory, and political philosophy.

She is at work on a novel, tentatively titled “The Thousands,” which chronicles America’s violent history following the Civil War through the eyes of the Buffalo Soldiers—African American infantry and cavalry units who fought during the “Indian campaigns.”

She is the recipient of a Dobie Paisano Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, and a Whiting Writers Award. She has published fiction in The Best American Short Stories, Harper’s, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, and the New Yorker, which included her in its 20 Under 40 Fiction Issue. Her nonfiction has appeared in the American Prospect, the Guardian, the New York Times Magazine, the Oxford American, and the Washington Post Magazine.

Plotting Her Return (Harvard Gazette, 3/20/15)