She has such a rich expanse of her fictional turf wildly varied and yet always occupied with this kind of social manners and morals and taboos.
Her short stories have appeared in Atlanta, Harper's Magazine, Ladies Home Journal, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and StoryQuarterly.
[6] Published in 1995 by Houghton Mifflin, her first book was Polite Society, a novel told through a series of short stories is about a young woman from Tennessee who serves as a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal.
[7] In her second novel, The School of Beauty and Charm, Sumner portrays an adolescent girl raised in an affluent, Christian-oriented Southern family who struggles under the pressure from her parents to become a “proper young lady," getting involved in alcohol and drugs.
[9] The ghost of a medicine woman called Abuela narrates this story of star–crossed lovers set in a mixed community of Native Americans, Hispanics, and whites of Taos, New Mexico.
[10] Its plot pulls from aspects of Sumner's own life, telling the story of a 12-year-old girl who moves to a small town in Georgia after her father dies with her mother who is an English professor.