The book, edited by Toni Morrison, was met with critical acclaim and praised by leading intellectuals including James Baldwin and John Updike.

[3] Her sophomore novel Eva's Man was met with less renown and characterized as "dangerous" by some critics for its raw depiction of cruelty and violence.

[8] Although she was described as painfully shy, many of Jones's elementary school instructors recognized her writing skills and encouraged her talent to grow.

[1] Morrison was an editor at Random House at the time and was so impressed after reading Jones's manuscript that she wrote that "no novel about any black woman could ever be the same after this".

[1] She left her faculty position in 1983 and moved to Europe, where she wrote and published Die Vogelfaengerin (The Birdwatcher) in Germany, and a poetry collection, Xarque and Other Poems.

Authors associated with the Black Women's Movement include Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, among others.

Ursa's search reflects her struggle to construct selfhood amidst the traumatic stories told by her great-grandmother and grandmother of their experiences at the hands of the Portuguese Brazilian slaveholder Simon Corregidora.

Ursa's matrilineal line—great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother—make it their lives' purpose to keep alive the history of their abuse and torture, and by extension that of African slaves in the New World.

When Ursa and her husband Mutt get into a physical altercation regarding her refusal to stop singing, she falls (or is pushed) down a flight of stairs, loses her unborn baby, and has an emergency hysterectomy.

Incest is a major theme in a novel, and a recurring trope in the works of other prominent African-American writers at the time, including: Toni Morrison (The Bluest Eye), Maya Angelou's (I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings), Alice Walker's (The Child Who Favored Daughter), and James Baldwin's (Just Above My Head).

Abdur-Rahman sees the incest motif as a site to "critique society for its egregious neglect of black women and children.

Her relatives (Great-Gram, Gram and her mother) need her body to serve as a tool of procreation (make generation) and produce a child that represents material evidence of the horrors of incest and rape they experienced during slavery at the hands of Simon Corregidora.

Mutt seeks to restrict Ursa's sexuality only for his enjoyment and pushes her down the stairs at the beginning of the novel because of his jealousy at other men staring at her on-stage performance while she sings the Blues.

Sparse in language, relying on terse dialogue and haunting interior monologues, the novel stands in the naturalist tradition as it shows individuals fighting with historical forces beyond their control.

However, the end of the novel justifies its status as a "blues" narrative exploring both the pain and the beauty of relationships by implying that psychological struggle and an unsparing confrontation of the past may lead to recovery.

"[18] Eva's Man (1976), Jones's second novel, expands on the painful relationships between African-American women and men, but it does so with an even greater sense of hopelessness.

Her flashbacks reveal a life of relentless sexual objectification by men, starting with Freddy, a neighborhood boy who wants to play doctor, to Tyrone, her mother's lover who molests her, to her cousin, who propositions her.

Though Almeyda can only find her husband through memory and through art once they are separated, the poem focuses on desire as a positive theme, and it shows the possibility of love.

[15] Her novel Palmares (2021), about "the largest and best known of Brazil's quilombos, communities established by Africans who had escaped slavery",[7] was a 2022 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Fiction.

[20] In 2022, Jones was honored for lifetime achievement at 43rd annual American Book Awards, presented by Ishmael Reed's Before Columbus Foundation.

[22] While studying at the University of Michigan, Jones met a politically active student, Robert Higgins, who would eventually become her husband.

[13] At a gay rights parade in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the early 1980s, Higgins claimed to be God and that AIDS was a form of punishment.

On March 20, Jones's mother died, igniting Higgins to start a campaign against the University of Kentucky Markey Cancer Center, which had been the defendant in several civil rights cases in the recent past.

[1] Prior to this, Jones gave several interviews, including one with her mother in the pages of Obsidian and another in Claudia Tate's canonical anthology Black Women Writers.