Ann Packer (author)

Ann Packer
Ann Packer at the 2008 Texas Book Festival.
Born	1959 Stanford, California
Occupation	novelist, short story writer
Nationality	American
Website
www.annpacker.com

Ann Packer (born 1959) is an American novelist and short story writer, perhaps best known for her critically acclaimed first novel The Dive From Clausen's Pier. She is the recipient of a James Michener Award and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship.

Packer was born in Stanford, California. She is the daughter of Stanford University professors Herbert L. Packer and Nancy (Huddleston) Packer.

Her mother was a student of the historian/novelist Wallace Stegner at the Stanford Writing Program; Nancy Packer later joined the Stanford faculty as professor of English and creative writing. Her father was on the faculty of Stanford Law School, where he highlighted the tensions between Due Process and Crime Control. In 1969, when Ann was 10 years old, he suffered a stroke that paralyzed the right side of his body. He committed suicide three years later.

Her uncle, George Huddleston, Jr., and her grandfather, George Huddleston, Sr., were congressmen from Alabama. Her brother, George Packer, is a novelist, journalist, and playwright. Her father was Jewish and her mother was from a Christian background.

She has two children and is married to the novelist and screenwriter Rafael Yglesias. She lives in the Bay Area and New York City.

Packer was an English major at Yale University, but only began writing fiction during her senior year. She moved to New York after college and took a job writing paperback cover copy at Ballantine Books. She attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop from 1986 to 1988, selling her first short story to The New Yorker a few weeks before receiving her M.F.A. degree.

In 1988 Packer moved to Madison, Wisconsin as a fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. During her two years in Wisconsin she published stories in literary magazines, including the story "Babies", which was included in the 1992 O. Henry Award prize stories collection. The New Yorker story, "Mendocino", became the title story of her first book, Mendocino and Other Stories, published by Chronicle Books in 1994.