Jackie’s life has been anything but ordinary from the very beginning. She was born in 1942 to medical missionary parents in Chengdu, China. Two and a half years later her family fled the escalating war between China and Japan, flying “over the Hump” of the Himalaya Mountains to India. In Mumbai they waited six months for passage home to the United States. While there Jackie turned three years old.

Following a childhood in West Virginia, she lived in Alaska for five life-changing years, gaining a love of mountainous landscapes and outdoor adventure. While in Alaska she found a passion for environmental work which led to a thirty-five-year career mostly based in New England. For the past decade she has focused on writing and editing.

Always interested in seeing new places, Jackie spent thirteen months on a sailboat in the canals and rivers of Europe in the early 1990s. She also made five return trips to China. The highlight of those visits was a 2007 retracing of her parents’ 1932 trek to the eastern rim of the Tibetan Plateau.

Jackie is a cum laude graduate of Muskingum College (now University) in Ohio and completed masters level coursework at the University of New Hampshire.

She has a son and daughter and has lived on the western slope of Vermont’s Green Mountains for three decades.