Short Story Writer Z.Z. Packer to Speak at Pitt March 16

PITTSBURGH—Short story writer Z.Z. Packer will give an evening reading at the University of Pittsburgh campus as part of the Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers Series at 8:30 p.m. March 16 in Room 125, Frick Fine Arts Building Auditorium, Schenley Drive, Oakland. This event is free and open to the public.

Author of Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (Riverhead Books, 2003), Packer has written for the New Yorker, Harper's, and Story magazines. Her stories have been published in Best American Short Stories, 2000 (Houghton Mifflin Co., 2000) and 25 and Under: Fiction (W.W. Norton & Company, 1997).

Packer is a Jones lecturer at Stanford University, where she has been a Wallace Stegner-Truman Capote fellow. She received the Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale University in 1994, the Master of Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1995, and the Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Iowa in 1999. A recipient of a Whiting Writer's Award and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, Packer lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The 2004-05 Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers Series, which runs through April 7, is cosponsored by the Wyndham Garden Hotel-University Place and Pitt's Center for Latin American Studies, University Center for International Studies, The Book Center, and the University of Pittsburgh Press.

For more information, visit www.english.pitt.edu/events/pcws_schedule.html.

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