“About”

I am a writer and designer who lives in California. I publish the weekly newsletter Lightplay as well as the indie bookmaking project Enchant Books. I was born in San Francisco, raised in Mendocino County, and currently live in West Hollywood. My pronouns are he/they. I like folding paper, writing letters, running, making music, cooking, surfing, playing with my kid, eating, reading, housework, collaborating on projects, listening to music, mending, woodworking, gardening, petting my cat, sleeping, taking photographs, watching movies, walking, traveling, and writing.

Get in touch!

me@jaspernighthawk.com

“About,” but longer

What to know about me? I’ll start with vocation. I am a writer and designer. I have always wanted to make art, and the artforms I am most drawn to are the book, the magazine, and the website. I used to write a lot of short stories, some of which I published in various online and print outlets. But for a long time now my efforts have been focused on writing a memoir. I hope to finish it soon, and to publish it. In the meantime, I have been putting out a lot of smaller pieces in my email newsletter Lightplay. (Publishing since 2020!) I like having this space to write shorter, bloggier things, mostly about books and cooking and being a human in tough times. I also just like trying things out—in recent years I’ve experimented with returning to blogging, with making an offbeat podcast, and with keeping a family website. Still, my big ambitions run to books, and I hope to follow the book I’m writing now with novels and other projects.

In my professional life, I have had mixed success making money as a writer and designer. But I’ve had more success with this than I did working as a carpenter, a server, or a salesclerk! Today I work as the Director of Strategic Communications and Storytelling for Antioch University. It’s an interesting job, and I’m lucky to get to work with lots of brilliant and wise people from inside the academy. Antioch is a special institution, with a long history of innovation and prioritizing equity in both mission and action. It’s my day job, but I do feel lucky to get to tell Antioch’s stories. I assist with executive communications, edit the University News site Common Thread, serve as Co-Editor and Creative Director for the Antioch Alumni Magazine, and host the Seed Field Podcast, among other responsibilities. Prior to starting this role at Antioch, I worked for many years as a freelance writer and writing tutor, and I spent seven years working as a teaching poet in Mendocino County public schools through California Poets in the Schools. I still do some tutoring and design work on a freelance basis through Nighthawk Studio. I am also the longtime graphic designer for the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference, where I designed the literary magazine Noyo Review and continue to serve as its designer. Looking back at my career so far, I’m grateful to have worked in a few places, for a long time in each. Much of the satisfaction I get from work comes from participating in a meaningful collective endeavor. This experience of rootedness in a community of colleagues seems to be getting rarer. I’m grateful that it hasn’t been rare for me.

I live in Los Angeles, where there really is something special about the quality of the light. I share a two-bedroom apartment with my partner, child, and cat. We wish we had a back yard or even a balcony, but we’re blessed to live in an urban planner’s dream of a neighborhood. We walk to the grocery store, to the kid’s preschool, to the coffee shop, to the park, and to the hardware store. Often a week will go by without me getting in a car—put it like that and I feel like a millionaire. I am lucky to still spend big chunks of time with my parents on the Mendocino Coast, where I grew up and spent most of my 20s.

California is a wonderful place to live, in my opinion, though in the last decade I have also begun to reckon with the vast violence that white Americans and Spanish missionaries before them have done both to the Indigenous people who have lived here since time immemorial and to the Asian, Latiné, Black, Pacific Islander, and other folks who have done and continue to do so much to make this land so incredibly rich. I think all Californians need to work to resist and understand the systems of white supremacy that continue to oppress almost all of us—and oppresses some of our neighbors much more than others.

One thing I always want to be clear about: while my last name is Nighthawk, I am white, not Native American. I was given the name Nighthawk by my parents. There were nighthawks nesting near where we lived when I was born, and in the summer leading up to my birth, my mom and dad would watch these incredible birds dance their show-off dance every night at sunset. My parents are both, in their way, hippies, and my birth certificate reads Jasper Nighthawk Henderson. I always loved my middle name, and over the years many people came to refer to me by it. When my partner Lisa Locascio Nighthawk and I were getting married, we chose to take this name as our family name, as something we would share with each other and with our child.

As far as education, I have had the chance to learn with great teachers at three big institutions: Fort Bragg Unified School District (where I graduated from elementary, middle, and high school), Harvard College (where I did my bachelor’s in Slavic Languages and Literature), and Antioch University (where I got my MFA in Creative Writing). In my professional life and in my artistic development I’ve been lucky to have had several great mentors over the years. I’ve also had some great therapists. I’m mostly glad to have had the chance to spend so much of my life learning things, both formally and informally. Not all writers are intellectually restless generalists who want to spend great lengths of time exploring this and that, but I am. I have also been lucky to attend the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference annually for quite a few years now, studying in workshop with great writers including Victoria Chang, Kij Johnson, Carvell Wallace, and Henry Hoke.

I want to say that life is more than just a CV, but in fact the above details do capture much of how I spend my waking hours. The big thing that’s left out is my family. I am the proud parent of a toddler, and the hours I spend with him and his mom are the center around which my days orbit. I also am blessed to have a big, sprawling family and many beloved friends who I always want to spend more time with. And I love cooking and running and traveling and watching basketball on TV and reading the London Review of Books and N+1 and Aperture and baking bread and swimming in the ocean and gleaning fruit off neighborhood trees and making music and taking photographs and talking with my neighbors and dreaming of surfing again.

Third-Person Bio

Jasper Nighthawk is a writer and designer from California. His writing has appeared in Joyland, Juked, 7×7, Lunch Ticket, and Your Impossible Voice. It also appears in Lightplay, his irregularly published email newsletter. He is the Director of Strategic Communications and Storytelling at Antioch University, where he assists with executive communications, edits the University News site Common Thread, serves as Co-Editor and Creative Director for the Antioch Alumni Magazine, and hosts the Seed Field Podcast. He is also the longtime graphic designer for the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference, where he designed the literary magazine Noyo Review. He also occasionally tutors, does book design, and takes on other freelance jobs through Nighthawk Studio. He has an AB from Harvard College and an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University. He lives in Los Angeles and Mendocino with his partner, child, and cat.