“You know what I mean? I was 19 and crazy back then,” she began to read, her voice strong and powerful. The sweet voice in which she had introduced herself faded away as she began to read her short story, ‘Pita Delicious,’ aloud. She stood tall on the podium, her hair tied back into a fancy ponytail.

ZZ Packer is the African-American author of Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, published in 2003, and was one of the writers featured in The New Yorker ‘20 under 40: Fiction Issue’ this past summer.
She was the last speaker for this semester’s Zell Visiting Writers Series held at the Helmut Stern Auditorium of the University of Michigan Museum of Art.

Ten minutes prior to the start of the event, the auditorium was packed with a diverse crowd—from high school students to elderly people—all waiting to see ZZ Packer read. Although the auditorium was noisy, the room soon quieted down once the lights were dimmed, and a speaker stood on the stage. She gave the audience a brief background of ZZ Packer, and finally welcomed her up to the podium.
ZZ Packer quickly climbed up to the stage, her ponytail bouncing around as she settled herself onto the podium. After a quick, polite introduction, she dove into her reading.

‘Pita Delicious,’ the first of the three stories she read, is a short romance between an African American Pita Delicious employee and a Jewish grad student. She then followed with an excerpt of ‘Dayward,’ a historical fiction featuring two former slaves during the Reconstruction. Lastly, she read ‘Brownies,’ a story from Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, about racism encountered by a group of young African-American girls.

After every story she read, the audience applauded loudly as they whispered their reactions into their neighbors’ ears. Every short story she read at the event was powerful. Her characters were human, with real thoughts and actions; and every story contained the larger theme of race, of living life as an African-American.

She finished the event with a quick “thanks,” and disappeared down the stairs, as a roar of clapping hands rang throughout the small auditorium.