George Packer

George Packer was named a staff writer for The New Yorker in May, 2003. He has written on the atrocities committed in Sierra Leone, the Al-Jazeera satellite news channel, and civil unrest in the Ivory Coast. In 2003, Packer was awarded two Overseas Press Club awards, one for his influential 20,000-word examination of the difficulties faced during the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq (November, 2003), and the second, in the category of human rights, for his coverage of the civil war in Sierra Leone (January, 2003).

Packer was a 2001-2002 Guggenheim Fellow and has contributed many articles, essays, and reviews on foreign affairs, American politics, and literature to the New York Times Magazine, Dissent, Mother Jones, Harper’s, and other publications. He has taught writing at Harvard, Sarah Lawrence, Bennington, and Columbia.

Packer is the author of “The Assassins’ Gate” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005), a collection of his reporting from Iraq for the magazine. He is also the author of “The Village of Waiting” (Vintage, 1988; reissued by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001), about his experience in Africa. His book “Blood of the Liberals” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000), a three-generational non-fiction history of his family and American liberalism in the twentieth century, won the 2001 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. He has also written two novels, “The Half Man” (Random House, 1991) and “Central Square” (Graywolf, 1998).

George Packer was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay area. After graduating from Yale in 1982, he served in the Peace Corp in Togo, West Africa. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Photo credit: Sigrid Estrada