2022 Maria Thomas Fiction Award Winner — A THOUSAND POINTS OF LIGHT

by MARC-VINCENT JACKSON

(SENEGAL 1986–89)

A Thousand Points of Light

Beautiful and determined, an outcast Senegalese woman clings relentlessly to dreams of her beloved savior, a lost folklore hero, returning to her from across the ocean …

Broken, but wise, a devoted griot painfully witnesses and faithfully tells her dogged plight, loving her from afar and mostly in vain …

Committed American volunteers zealously navigate a developing, culturally rich African country, becoming intimately immersed, and sometimes, unwittingly entangled …

Alienated and frustrated, one unsuspecting volunteer bitterly chronicles his uneasy experiences with unsparing criticism …

A desperate journey, an unspoken heart, patriotic dedication, and a candid diary lyrically meld into a seamless mystical reality with surprising results.

Inspired by his U.S. Peace Corps service during George H.W. Bush’s presidency, Marc-Vincent Jackson has written A Thousand Points of Light, an insightful debut novel that is an artfully written with an engaging tale of interwoven lives and voices in 1980’s Senegal. It magically recounts an unappreciated Fatou Ka’s burning quest to be reunited with her true love, who turns out to be Malcolm Lavelle King, an unlikely, tragic antihero from Los Angeles serving as a disgruntled development volunteer.

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Marc-Vincent Jackson

For nearly three decades, Marc-Vincent Jackson (Senegal 1986-89) has been an educator specializing in World Languages having taught three different languages on three continents. Multicultural and multilingual (English, French, Spanish and Wolof), he attended the University of Bordeaux, France and the University of Seville, Spain and graduated from the University of Colorado, Boulder with a B.A. in Romance Languages and a B.S. in Journalism. He has been associated with a variety of African diaspora film festivals, such as FESPACO, as well as the Pan African Film Festival, in various capacities since its founding. Upon settling in the United States, he eventually pursued an M.A. in Education at California State University, Dominguez Hills in Los Angeles, where he currently resides when not almost religiously traveling the world! A Thousand Points of Light is his debut novel.

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A Thousand Points of Light
Marc-Vincent  Jackson (Senegal 1986-89)
Page Publishing, 2021
484 pages
$32.95 (paperback), $9.99 (Kindle)