Jones's travel essay, "Lard is Good For You," appeared in the inaugural edition of
Best American Travel Writing, edited by
Bill Bryson. This essay became the first chapter in ''The Blind Masseuse: A Traveler's Memoir from Costa Rica to Cambodia
(University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), a travelogue about Jones’s travels in Costa Rica, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, Burma, India, and Egypt. The Blind Masseuse
explores exoticism and the ethics of traveling as an American abroad and was named Recommended Reading by PEN America and National Geographic and a Top Ten Travel Title of 2013 by Publishers Weekly''.
Unaccompanied Minors (New American Press, 2014), a collection of stories with adolescent protagonists, won the
New American Fiction Prize and was named by the
Star-Ledger's Jacqueline Cutler as one of the "Ten Best Books of 2014 by New Jersey Authors." Jones' third book, the critical memoir
The Wanting Was a Wilderness: Cheryl Strayed’s Wild and the Art of Memoir (Fiction Advocate, 2020), is a hybrid nonfiction work that the Center for Fiction described as "an intertextual blend of criticism and personal memoir that highlights the importance of contemporary literary analysis." Her short stories, essays, and criticism have appeared in
New York Magazine, BOMB,
The Boston Globe, AGNI, Prairie Schooner, Post Road, the Iowa Review, The Rumpus, and WBUR’s
Cognoscenti. She is also the editor of Edge of the World, an anthology of travel essays by LGBTQ+ writers including
Alexander Chee,
Daisy Hernández, and
Garrard Conley. Jones is Assistant Professor at
Emerson College in the department of Writing, Literature and Publishing. Emerson College awarded her the Alan Stanzler Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2016. She is also on the faculty of the low-residency Newport MFA program at
Salve Regina University. She was named a
Fulbright Specialist in 2024. ==Awards==