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 nonfiction to The New York Times Magazine since 2000. Her nonfiction 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 Kentucky Book Award, a Commonwealth First Fiction Award, and an ALEX Award. She was a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist and 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 Truman Capote Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, 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 has been 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. 

Before coming to Vanderbilt, Packer taught at Harvard, MIT, Brown, Stanford, Tulane, the MFA at Hunter Collegeand the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. 

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 worked under James Alan McPherson and Marilynne Robinson at the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.