bio | バイオ

About Jackson | ジャクソンについて

Jackson (Kanahashi) Bliss is the best-selling, award-winning, mixed-race/Nisei author of COUNTERFACTUAL LOVE STORIES & OTHER EXPERIMENTS (Noemi Press, 2021), AMNESIA OF JUNE BUGS (7.13 Books, 2022), DREAM POP ORIGAMI (Unsolicited Press, 2022), & the newsletter MIXTAPE. Born & raised in Traverse City, Michigan, until the age of fourteen, he spent his adult life in SoCal, the Pacific Northwest, & Chicago with stints in Argentina and Burkina Faso writing both music and non/fiction about his global life. Jackson has a BA in comp lit from Oberlin College, a MFA from the University of Notre Dame where he was the Fiction Fellow & the Sparks Prize winner, a MA in English, & a PhD in Literature & Creative Writing from USC where he worked with Aimee Bender, Viet Thanh Nguyen, & TC Boyle. His stories & essays have appeared in the New York Times, Tin House, Ploughshares, Columbia Journal, Guernica, Longreads, Necessary Fiction, Antioch Review, Poets & Writers, TriQuarterly, Fiction, The Offing, Witness, Hypertext, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Vol.1 Brooklyn, ZYZZYVA, Joyland, Santa Monica Review, Juked, Quarterly West, Adroit Journal, The Daily Dot, Pleiades, the 2012-2013 Anthology of APIA Literature, Arts & Letters, Fiction International, Hyphen, Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, LitReactor, Monkey Bicycle, & 3 am Magazine, among others. Jackson lives in LA. You can find him on YouTube & Instagram.

10 Random Facts about Jackson

 一。 Jackson speaks Japanese like a schoolboy.  Not as in giddy schoolboy either, but as in flawed grammar, boyish facial expressions, questionable intonations, & ten-year old vocabulary.

二。Jackson has collaborated on numerous interdisciplinary projects, including The Miracle of the Walking Fish, a bilingual immigrant narrative libretto that composer, Laura Kramer, set to music for the Pasadena Conservatory of Music's "Song About Places" 2015 series, The Voice Inside Your Bones, an exquisite corpse inspired project with LA-based artist, Rick Potts, for the 7x7 project, & the speculative hypertext, DUKKHA, MY LOVE, which Jackson created the art, the text, & the music for.

三。Jackson speaks French & Spanish fluently.  Way better, in fact, than Nihongo, even though he is Nisei, hapa, & nikkeijin.  By the way, if you call Jackson white, he'll kick your ass.

四。Jackson has three tats: "おみやげ," an excerpt from a Japanese poem by Rin Ishigaki on his forearm, a Japanese half-sleeve with 芸者, 忍者, 金閣寺, 富士山, さくら, & a portrait of Avalokiteshvara on his right shoulder.

五。Jackson’s band name is Mizu. You can listen to his music wherever streaming is available.

六。Some of his favorite cities include:  Chicago, 東京, LA, Marrakech, Paris, Amsterdam, Colonia del Sacramento, New York, Edinburgh, Kyōto, Buenos Aires, Budapest, Cuzco, Aix, 大坂, Stockholm, Seattle, Toronto, Barcelona, Sitges, Montréal, Istanbul, Lyon, Berlin, Hong Kong, Prague, London, Brugge, Brussels, Seoul, Bratislava, Copenhagen, & Vienna.

七。Jackson is mostly vegan, a runner, & a (bad) Buddhist.

八。Obsessed with お茶, dream pop, high-speed trains, the perfect sleeve, cafés with wood interiors, tight jeans, マンガ, vinyl shopping, running, youth culture, B Corporations, 味噌汁, & video games, Jackson is a good hapa but a bad Nisei.

九。Musically, Jackson will listen to almost anything on his turntable, except bad country, Ted Nugent, Kid Rock, or mumble rap.  Special shout outs to dream pop, indie, electronic, hip-hop, house, classical, jazz, singer songwriter, IDM, trip-hop, industrial, new wave, break beats, dub, lo-fi, downtempo, world music, post-rock, & R + B.

十。Some of Jackson's artistic & literary influences include:  Zadie Smith, Junot Diaz, Haruki Murakami, The Smiths, Joan Didion, Wong Kar Wai, Aimee Bender, John Coltrane, DJ Krush, Romance マンガ, Wanda Sykes, Life is Strange, Banana Yoshimoto, Beach House, JD Salinger, Arundhati Roy, Deus Ex, Banksy, Insecure, Jeffrey Eugenides, Kendrick Lamar, The Last of Us, Yoshitoki Ōima, TC Boyle, Karen Tei Yamashita, Chance the Rapper, Adrian Tomine, Balmorhea, Sofia Copola's early work, the Final Fantasy series (especially VII, X, XII, & XV), Jim Shephard, Lydia Davis, Common, Carole Maso, & Proust.