Jackson Bliss earned his MFA in fiction from the University of Notre Dame where he was the Fiction Fellow and the 2007 Sparks Prize Winner and his PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from USC where he worked with TC Boyle, Aimee Bender, and Viet Thanh Nguyen as a College Merit Award Fellow, FLAS fellow in Japanese, and two time ACE/Nikaido Fellow. Jackson was the 1st 2013 Runner-Up for the Poets & Writer’s California Exchange Award in fiction. His short stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Tin House, Antioch Review, Kenyon Review, Fiction, Santa Monica Review, Boston Review, Quarterly West, ZYZZYVA, Arts & Letters, Pleiades, Fiction International, Notre Dame Review, 2012-2013 Anthology of APIA Literature, African American Review, Kartika Review, Quarter After Eight, Connecticut Review, Stand (UK), 3:am Magazine The Good Men Project, The Daily Dot, and the Huffington Post UK, among others. Jackson is a lecturer at the University of California Irvine and CSUN. "Castaways and Worry Dolls" is an excerpt from his novella, The Laws of Rhetoric and Drowning.
