Nancy Huddleston Packer to read from her works for Huntingdon's Jimmy Loeb Literary Series Montgomery, Ala.—Stanford
University Professor of English Emerita Nancy Huddleston Packer
will read from her new collection of stories for Huntingdon
College's Jimmy Loeb Literary Series, Monday, April 8, at 7:00
p.m. in the College's new Leo J. Drum Jr. Theater, Cloverdale
Campus. Following the reading, Ms. Packer and Huntingdon
President J. Cameron West will lead a discussion with the audience
on the subject, "Writing About Women: Then and Now." The program
is free and open to the public.
Packer is the author of five short story
collections: Small Moments (1976), which received the
Commonwealth Club of California Award; In My Father's House:
Tales of an Unconformable Man (1988); The Women Who
Walk (1989); Jealous-Hearted Me (1997), which
received the Alabama Library Association Award; and Old Ladies
(2012). Her stories have been widely
anthologized, including in O. Henry Prize Stories
and Best American Stories. She has also co-authored
several textbooks on writing.
As the daughter of U.S. Representative
George Huddleston, Packer spent her
summers in Birmingham and the rest of the year living in
Washington, D.C., until she was 12, when the family relocated to
Birmingham year-round. She remained in the area through high
school and her undergraduate years at Birmingham-Southern College,
then completed a master's degree in theology at the University of
Chicago. Her first national publication was the short story,
"Povera Baby," in the October 1953 issue of Harper's Magazine.
In 1958, she moved to California with her new husband, Herbert
Packer, a Stanford University law professor. There, she received
a Wallace Stegner Writing Fellowship and subsequently joined the
Stanford English Department faculty. She served as Director of
Creative Writing and as Director of Freshman English and retired
in 1993 as the Melvin and Bill Lane Professor in the Humanities.
Herbert Packer, who died in 1972, authored several important legal
works, including The Limits of Criminal Sanction, which is
still used in law schools. The Packers passed along their writing
skills to their children, who have made names in the writing
world, as well. Daughter Ann Packer is a novelist and short story
writer and son George Packer is a staff writer with The New
Yorker.
Huntingdon College has a 158-year
commitment to nurturing growth in faith, wisdom, and service and
to graduating individuals prepared to succeed in a rapidly
changing world. The College's motto, "Enter to grow in wisdom; go
forth to apply wisdom in service," is engraved in stone above the
door of Huntingdon's historic Flowers Hall. Ranked in the top tier of regional colleges by
U.S. News and World Report and consistently listed in the
Princeton Review's "The Best Colleges: Region by Region,"
Huntingdon is listed on the National Register of Historic Places
and has for three years been named to the President's Higher
Education Community Service Honor Roll. Washington Monthly,
which ranks colleges on the basis of their contribution to the
public good, places Huntingdon in the top 20% of 352 baccalaureate
colleges.
Huntingdon's Cultural and Community Events series is co-sponsored
by Baptist Health.
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