Eric Jackson was born and raised in Santurce, a district of San Juan, Puerto Rico, the son of a typewriter/copy machine technician and a homemaker. He graduated Cum Laude with an Associate Degree in Advertising from the Carolina Community College of the University of Puerto Rico, and he obtained a Bachelors Degree in Telecommunications from Sacred Heart University also in Puerto Rico. In the early 80’s, Eric attended Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah and then the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.  During this time he became politically active, joining peace and anti-nuclear organizations.  He collaborated with the College Democrats, Amnesty International and the pacifist group Response.  In a delegation called BYU Students for Peace, he participated in the historic March for the Americas that gathered at the Utah State Capitol to advocate for peaceful solutions to the political turmoil effecting countries in the Central American region.

From 1981 to 1983, Eric was a full time missionary serving the population of Latin American migrant farm workers in several cities of the central coast and the San Joaquin Valley of the state of California.While living in Puerto Rico until the mid 90’s, Eric Jackson continued his involvement in several social and political causes.  He was an activist for social justice, the protection of El Yunque Rainforest from commercial logging, involved in the anti-nuclear and peace movements, and championed gay and lesbian rights. He worked as a news writer for Channel 24, an all-news television station in San Juan, and was the managing editor of the 1992 edition of the Puerto Rico Official Industrial Directory, a business-to-business publication.  He was also a news writer and media collaborator with the Puerto Rican National Ecumenical Movement and was a member of the organizing committee of Marchers for Peace, a peace organization.  

Eric Jackson considers two milestones in his life.  In 1984, one year after returning from California from his full-time Mormon mission, Eric decided to permanently leave the Mormon Church when he came out of the closet as a gay man.  And in 1990, a few weeks after returning from a trip to Cuba as an independent journalist, he decided to permanently sever all ties to the socialist ideology when he concluded that what he saw in Cuba taught him that a state-run socialist economy was not the answer to a society’s needs for social and economic justice and development.  Today, Eric believes that social democracy seems to be a system that better represents the mechanisms that a society needs to achieve civil liberties, freedom and economic growth.

Eric lived in New York City until mid 2006, where he continued his social activism and his advocacy in favor of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights.  He is a former managing editor of the Rainbow Heights Journal, the literary magazine of the Rainbow Heights Club, an LGBT social services agency in Brooklyn.His articles have appeared in the weekly Claridad, the New York Blade, New York City Voices, PuertoRicoParaTodos.org  and ProyectoVision.net.

A Cause to Kill For, a political suspense thriller about Puerto Rico, is his first novel.  Eric Jackson is currently working on his second novel, a theological suspense thriller about the life of Lucifer.  He lives in Puerto Rico with Glen, his domestic partner for the last 13 years.

http://www.acausetokillfor.com/