Read the winning piece of our 2025 Nonfiction Contest “Through the Mirror” by Jessie Cato selected by Lucy Ives.

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ZZ Packer

ZZ Packer is the winner of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Hutchins Center Fellowship for African and African American Research at Harvard. She teaches at Vanderbilt University.

Fiction

Fall 2025

What’s Done Is Done

By ZZ Packer

Old Fort Lancaster, 1867 Will Cathay remembered all the times in Louisville when he’d passed the colored schoolhouse and wondered if he should stop the kindly-looking girl who turned out […]