Meet Valencia (Val) Banks Freeman. Chicagoan, WestSider, Malcolm X College graduate, Owner-Publisher of BlackSide Press, the largest community newspaper in the city, Community Activist and winner of one billion dollars from Lotto-50 - the first entire All-Fifty-States lottery. What? An activist winning the lottery? How can that be? True Activists don't buy lottery tickets. They protest against them. If you ever listened to black talk radio or seen the activists on television, then you know that the activists always have all the answers. But seldom do they ever have the money to fix the problems. Billion Dollar Winner tells the story of what happens when one of the main individuals who protested the loudest against the Lotto-50 lottery game turns out to win the very lottery she so actively disparaged. Will Val remain true to her activist nature? Or will the love of money, which is at the root of all evil, change her and make her the hypocrite everyone calls her when they find out she won the money? And just how did someone who never bought a lottery ticket in her entire life come to possess one in the first place?
A.P. Jones was born in Chicago. She was raised in the Cabrini-Green Housing Projects in the 1960s . She attended Jenner Elementary, Cooley U.G.C and Wells Senior High School. She also was a student at the University of Illinois - Chicago Circle Campus where she majored in Spanish and minored in Education and African-American History.
A.P. Jones has over the years worked in a variety of industries. She spent the last 33 years working for a major insurance company where she was responsible for the all the programs that paid its nationwide manager sales force. She is also the award winning featured columnist for the Austin Weekly News.
After getting laid off in 2007, she decided to try her hand at fiction writing. Billion Dollar Winner is her first full length feature novel. She is currently finishing up her second novel Sunny and Gene which she expects to have on the market some time in 2010.
She continues to live on the WestSide of Chicago and make it and the people living there the focus of all her fiction work.
