After earning the Frances Steloff Award for Fiction while attending Connecticut College, she graduated with a Masters in creative writing at Brown University. The same year, she published her first book Corregidora. Ever since she left her post as associate professor from the University of Michigan, Jones has kept her life private in order to focus more on her writings. Her papers are currently housed at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University.

Fiction

• Corregidora (novel) (1975)
• Eva's Man (novel) (1976)
• White Rat (short stories) (1977)
• The Healing (novel) (1998)
• Mosquito (novel) (1999)

Poetry collections

• Song for Anninho (1981)
• The Hermit-Woman (1983)
• Xarque and Other Poems (1985)

Other works

• Chile Woman (play) (1974)
• Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature (criticism) (1991)