Skip to main content

Ann Packer

Biography

Ann Packer

Ann Packer was born in Stanford, California, in 1959, and grew up near Stanford University, where her parents were professors. She attended Yale University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has received fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Michener-Copernicus Society, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

She is the acclaimed author of two collections of short fiction, SWIM BACK TO ME and MENDOCINO AND OTHER STORIES, and two bestselling novels, SONGS WITHOUT WORDS and THE DIVE FROM CLAUSEN'S PIER, which received the Kate Chopin Literary Award, among many other prizes and honors. Her short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and in the O. Henry Prize Stories anthologies, and her novels have been published around the world.

Ann returned to her native Bay Area in 1995. She lives in San Carlos with her family.

Ann Packer

Books by Ann Packer

by Ann Packer - Fiction

Bill Blair finds the land by accident, three wooded acres in a rustic community south of San Francisco, and buys the property on a whim. In Penny Greenway he finds a suitable wife, and they marry and have four kids. Thirty years later, the three oldest Blair children, now adults and still living near the family home, are disrupted by the return of the youngest, whose sudden presence and all-too-familiar troubles force a reckoning with who they are, separately and together, and set off a struggle over the family’s future.

written by Ann Packer; read by Cotter Smith, Santino Fontana, Marin Ireland, Thomas Sadoski and Frederick Weller - Fiction

Bill Blair finds the land by accident, three wooded acres in a rustic community south of San Francisco, and buys the property on a whim. In Penny Greenway he finds a suitable wife, and they marry and have four kids. Thirty years later, the three oldest Blair children, now adults and still living near the family home, are disrupted by the return of the youngest, whose sudden presence and all-too-familiar troubles force a reckoning with who they are, separately and together, and set off a struggle over the family’s future.

by Ann Packer - Fiction, Short Stories

In this emotional collection, characters are shattered and remade by loss. A wife struggles to make sense of her husband’s disappearance; a mother mourns her teenage son through his favorite music; and a woman reflects on the year her family collapsed.