Award-winning writer ZZ Packer visits UNH

By Erika Mantz, Media Relations

ZZ Packer

ZZ Packer, author of the national bestseller and New York Times Notable Book Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, will talk about and read from her work Thursday, March 24, 2005, at 6:30 p.m. in the auditorium of Murkland Hall at the University of New Hampshire. Packer will also sign copies of her book, which will be for sale after the reading.
Sponsored by the UNH English Department’s Writers Series, the lecture is free and open to the public.

Packer’s stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Story, Best American Short Stories (2000 and 2003), the anthology Twenty-Five and Under, and on NPR’s Selected Shorts. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. A graduate of Yale University, the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and the Writing Seminar at Johns Hopkins University, Packer has been a Wallace Stegner-Truman Capote Fellow at Stanford University, where she is currently a Jones lecturer.

The stories in Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, Packer’s debut collection of stories, take readers into the lives of people who aren’t quite sure of their place in society. Her characters — African-American church ladies and white intellectuals, hipsters and earnest strivers, residents of housing projects and affluent suburbs — inhabit a fictional territory where America’s racial, social and sexual boundaries meet and blur.