Academics

AUP Welcomes ZZ Packer as 2026 Writer in Residence

The American University of Paris (AUP) and the Centre Culturel Irlandais (Irish Cultural Center) in Paris are pleased to announce this year’s writer in residence, ZZ Packer. 

ZZ Packer is a writer, editor and instructor of creative writing who has taught at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, The Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin, Tulane University, Stanford University and Johns Hopkins. More recently, she has taught at MIT and at Williams College, where she was also a writer in residence. She currently teaches at Harvard University and in the MFA program at Vanderbilt.

Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Story, Ploughshares, Granta, Zoetrope All-Story, Best American Short Stories 2000, Best American Short Stories 2003 and 100 Years of The Best American Short Stories, and her non-fiction has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine, The Believer, The American Prospect, The Oxford American, The Guardian, The New York Times Book Review, Newsweek Online and The New Yorker Online. 

If you leave a place, then everything that that place means to you comes into sharper relief, compared to where you’re now living...

ZZ Packer

Mobility has long defined Packer’s literary career, which makes the AUP residency feel especially fitting. In a recent interview with Gulf Coast magazine, she expressed affinity with James Baldwin’s idea that he couldn’t truly write about America until he left the country: “I have this feeling that if you’re in a place, sometimes it’s very difficult to write about it honestly because you’re still dealing with your living in that place, and you don’t have as much perspective. Whereas, if you leave a place, then everything that that place means to you comes into sharper relief, compared to where you’re now living...”

Born in Chicago and raised in Atlanta and Louisville, Packer has since lived in many more places, having graduated from Yale University before earning degrees from Johns Hopkins and The Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. “I almost feel as though I’m not a native of any one place—though, I definitely consider myself a Southerner,” she said in the same interview. She has also been a Hodder Fellow at Princeton, and a Lillian Gollay Knafel fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard; she was writer in residence at Williams College and will now find herself at AUP during the 2026-2027 academic year. 

Her work has been widely recognized, with appearances on C-SPAN, BBC World and MSNBC as a Huffington Post contributor. She has also received the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and the American Academy of Berlin Prize. In addition, her collection of stories Drinking Coffee Elsewhere won the Commonwealth First Fiction Award, an ALEX Award and the National Book’s “5 under 35”. It became a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, was a New York Times Notable Book, and was selected for the Today Show Book Club by John Updike. 

The Paris Writer’s Residency, which provides accommodations at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in central Paris and offers opportunities to develop ongoing projects while also connecting with the AUP community, has previously been held by translator Daniel Hahn (2018), poet and translator Sampurna Chatterjee (2019), novelist Sophie Mackintosh (2021), poet, editor and translator E. Tracy Grinnell (2022), creative non-fiction writer and editor Tinashe Mushakavanhu (2023), and author Rachel Lyon (2024) and Alice Blackhurst (2025). 

Packer is currently working on a novel about Reconstruction and Buffalo Soldiers titled The Thousands, an excerpt of which appeared in The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40 Fiction Issue” and in The 1619 Project.