[3] Jones took an early interest in writing, winning a poetry contest in elementary school to give a reading at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture with children's author Walter Dean Myers.
[5] The latter, a professor at Marist College, gave her boxes of his extra books; one of these included Mary Helen Washington's collection Black-Eyed Susans and Midnight Birds: Stories by and about Black Women and after reading the anthology cover to cover, Jones turned to the book's index to create another reading list for herself.
[1] Jones moved to Los Angeles, California,[6] when she won PEN Center USA Emerging Voices fellowship in 2013.
[8] Jones has said that her own background as "a queer black girl from Harlem" made the work of women of color like Sandra Cisneros and Toni Morrison especially important to her growing up.
[12] Her poem "Homegoing AD" was published in Jesmyn Ward's collection The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race,[13] then anthologized in The Best American Non-Required Reading 2017, edited by Sarah Vowell.