Mount Mercy welcomes acclaimed fiction writer ZZ Packer

Mount Mercy University will welcome acclaimed fiction writer ZZ Packer for a special reading and Q&A on November 9. The Q&A starts at 3:30 p.m. and the reading starts at 7:00 p.m. Both events take place in Betty Cherry Heritage Hall and are free and open to the public. Seating may be limited.

Packer, the author of Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (a PEN/Faulkner finalist and a New York Times Notable Book), received her Master of Arts at John Hopkins and her Master of Fine Arts at the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop. She was a recent Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, where she also held Jones Lectureship.

Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Story, Ploughshares, Zoetrape and The Best American Short Stories 2000 and 2004, as well as read on NPR's Selected Shorts.

Packer is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and was recently named one of America's Young Innovators by Smithsonian Magazine, as well as one of America's Best Young novelists by Granta Magazine.

Reviews:

A tremendously talented young writer who doesn't feel the need to announce her genius or prove on every page that she's edgy. The world, she obviously knows, is full of sharp edges…she does what the best artists do: Takes pains to show us – with clarity and compassion – the ragged, sometimes sinister, almost always heartbreaking mess we make of things, and in face of that, the possibility of decency, generosity and courage. – The Buffalo News

ZZ Packer's voice is a wave born in mid-ocean, gathering strength, obeying the moon's pull, churning toward land, so that when you finally do turn to the first page and read the first paragraph of the first story, her strong, full, confident voice crashes over you.  – Publishers Weekly