She is the author of memoirs The Wanting Was a Wilderness (2020) and The Blind Masseuse (2013) and the short story collection Unaccompanied Minors (2014).

Jones has traveled extensively as an educator, including as a visiting professor on Semester at Sea, as the director of several programs in Cuba and as a Cuban Culture Expert on Royal Caribbean Cruises, and for a year in Costa Rica as a volunteer elementary school English teacher for WorldTeach, which was the subject of her first published essay, "Lard is Good For You".

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.

"[5] 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.