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RedditWhen ZZ Packer was 27, the New Yorker published her short story about a troubled black girl at Yale in its 2000 debut fiction issue. That same year, her tale about racial strife on a Brownie troop camping trip was chosen for The Best American Short Stories 2000.
Packer's skillful writing and the fresh view of the African-American experience presented in her two stories prompted so much literary buzz that publishers were soon bidding against one another for the privilege of bringing out her first book, a short-story collection titled Drinking Coffee Elsewhere. Published in 2003, the book was greeted with breathless reviews and was nominated for the 2004 PEN/Faulkner Prize.
"This is the old-time religion of storytelling, although Packer's prose supplies plenty of the edge and energy we expect from contemporary fiction," a reviewer in the New York Times enthused, while O magazine called her writing "acerbic, satirical, hilarious, nuanced, as fiercely unsentimental and deliciously subtle as Jane Austen."
Packer, now 34, was born in Chicago, where her mother worked for the Social Security Administration and her father owned a lounge and bar. Her given name is Zuwena (Swahili for "good"), but early on she tired of explaining how to pronounce it and opted for the nickname ZZ. When she was 5, the family moved to Atlanta, seeking a better life in the city known as the black mecca. But seven years later her parents divorced, and ZZ's mother moved back to her hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, with ZZ and ZZ's younger sister, Jamila.
Several of Packer's characters are from that seldom-written-about group known as black nerds—youngsters who love to read, do well in school and have to find a way to fit into a white-dominated arena of achievement. It's familiar territory for Packer, a tall, ebullient woman who took Advanced Placement classes in high school, planned on a career in science and won a scholarship to Yale.
By her junior year in college, Packer decided to abandon science for literature, to the initial dismay of her practical-minded parents. After receiving her B.A. from Yale in 1994, she was accepted first into the graduate Writing Seminars program at Johns Hopkins University and then into the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Packer's rise to prominence, though fast, required resilience and years of hard work. Ronnetta Fagan, an attorney and aspiring novelist from Houston, Texas, who attended a writers' workshop that Packer taught in San Francisco, remembers Packer displaying a large binder filled with rejection letters, including some 17 that the New Yorker sent her before finally accepting a story. "It helped me understand what I'd gotten myself into," says Fagan, "but it also encouraged me."
Another ingredient of Packer's success is her willingness to tackle uncomfortable issues of black and white. "The more race is not supposed to matter, the more it does," she says. "It's one of the conundrums of living in America today. And as a writer, I tend to be excited by dilemmas and problems."
Fearless young scholar who has the audacity to challange and "tackle issues of black and white." Truly a leader in the making.
Posted by jeanette reynolds on March 14,2008 | 10:34AM