"I wrote the first chapters for Dream Pop Origami in this nonfiction class back in 2002 in Portland where the entire class was just in-class writing prompts (it was great, but a workshop would have been better). I didn’t conceptualize this memoir until the first year of my MFA in 2005 and I didn’t actually begin writing the manuscript until 2008 during my Sparks Prize Fellowship."
— Jackson Bliss, interviewed by Porochista Khakpour for BOMB Magazine
Winner of the 2008 Sparks Prize, Jackson Bliss eventually finished his experimental memoir, Dream Pop Origami, and published it with Unsolicited Press in 2022. A lyrically charged memoir about growing up as a hapa teenager in America, Dream Pop Origami received praise from Emmy-award-winning actress and director Regina King ("Jackson Bliss paints with words. He is the Kendrick Lamar of the literary world"), author John D'Agata ("Bliss has made a memoir about how to nuture different worlds that occupy a self that is beautiful, fascinating, hearbreaking, essential"), and fellow Notre Dame MFA alumni Jenny Boully ("With candor and honesty, Bliss investigates how plans go awry, how following the pattern never leads to the perfection we seek") and Lily Hoàng ("To fulfill satisfaction, read this book"). Lit Reactor named Dream Pop Origami one of the "Best Books of 2022" and Independent Book Review featured it on its "30 Impressive Indie Books of 2022" list.
During the same year, Bliss published his debut novel, Amnesia of June Bugs (7.13 Books), which tells the stories of four passengers trapped in New York City's C train during Hurricane Sandy: a Chinese American graffiti artist, a biracial graphic designer, a Moroccan French translator, and an Indian American traveler from Chicago. Pulitzer Prize winning author Tommy Orange called Amnesia of June Bugs a "lush, kaleidoscopic love song to the city" and Viet Thanh Nguyen (author of The Sympathizer) praised the novel for its "hip, intimate, and heartfelt exploration of our multicultural, cosmopolitan world, one full of promise and yet under threat." One of Livingston Public Library's Notable Indie Books of 2022, Amnesia of June Bugs was reviewed in venues including Booklist ("Bliss upends the norms of the typical narrative"), Foreword Reviews ("5/5 stars"), and Lit Pub ("unbearably beautiful").
"Counterfactual Loves Stories & Other Experiments is in many ways a book about the negotiation of hapa identity in the Midwest told from a POV that is both Californian and transnational. To the naked eye, it probably doesn't read as Midwistern almost at all, but I guess it's my version. A version I would have loved to read growing up in the Midwest as a mixed-race/hapa kid trying to figure my shit out."
— Jackson Bliss in conversation with Bryan Hurt for Los Angeles Review of Books
Winner of the 2020 Noemi Book Award in Prose, Bliss's first book, Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments, was published by Noemi Press in 2021. From Aimee Bender ("A book of inspiring vitality and perception") to Matt Bell ("This is one of the most inviting and innovative collections I've read, an endlessly compelling source of righteous adventure and wonder"), Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments was met with wide acclaim. Bliss's debut story collection received reviews in Cleveland Review of Books, Los Angeles Review of Books, ZYZZYVA, Chicago Review of Books, and Juked. In a recent interview with Porochista Khakpour for BOMB Magazine, Bliss revealed he's in the final revision stages for his next collection of short stories: The Miseducation of Jessie Hayashi & His Cosmic Dictionary of Loss.
Read the interview in its entirety here.
Jackson (Kanahashi) Bliss is the 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.