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Jones had been punching up scripts for Williams and Nash – industry talk for making scripts funny – as they were just starting their production company, Kronicle Media. They didn’t have a management company yet. Jones would be their first client. “They said, ‘We’ve never been managers before, but we believe in you,’ Jones remembers them encouraging her about 7 years ago. ‘We want to get you started.’” Now, Nash and Williams have a management division with Kronicle Media that is so successful that they are unable to take on new clients. Other women like writer, producer, and actor Nkechi Carroll, currently the producer for the CW Network drama “All American,” took Jones to lunch frequently and took her under her wing. Black men like Joe Wilson, producer and writer for shows like “The Equalizer” and “NCIS” and writer Randy Huggins, currently working on 50 Cent’s “BMF” would reach out to Jones and take her to meetings. “They saw the grind, and they said we are going to help you and they would,” Jones recalls. “When you do the work, people want to help you. You can’t come to somebody and say I want to be a writer and you haven’t written anything.” Meg Deloatch, producer of Netflix’s “Family Reunion,” read Jones’s sample script, called her, and said, though she was fully staffed she wanted to meet with Jones. They met and within the week Jones was staffed as a writer on “Family Reunion.” In addition to “Family Reunion,” starring Tia and Tamara Mowry, Jones is currently a writer and executive story editor on CBS’ “The Neighborhood” as well as two Lifetime movies in development. Jones always knew she wanted to be in entertainment as a young girl drawing pictures, creating stories, writing, and watching television. “I didn’t put it together as a child that someone wrote the words that these people were saying on television,” Jones laughs. She ended up studying English and Broadcast Journalism at South Carolina State University, an HBCU in Orangeburg, South Carolina. There she garnered an internship at a news
station where she realized that thenewscaster’s copy was being written by someone else. Before she graduated from SCSU, she learned about a television internship where she could learn how shows were made. She and her best friend Yvette Nicole Brown, who is now an actress, both applied for the program and made it in.
“In the writer’s room, everyone treated them like they were Gods. I knew then that’s what I wanted to do,” said Jones.
But she wasn’t going to take a straight path to get there.
She got pregnant with her son before completing the program and had to leave. She went on to work in corporate America, but never lost her ambition to write. She would get up every morning at 5 a.m. to write and would send out sample scripts.
Her diligence paid off. She landed a job punching up scripts for producer Korin Huggins (now Williams).
“She told me: ‘I don’t know where you are in life, but you’re really funny. Quit your job and do this full-time,’” Jones remembers.
But Jones couldn’t afford to quit as a single parent with a young child, living in an expensive city like Los Angeles. But then the universe intervened, and she was laid off. She never went back to work. She gathered all her savings and continued writing every day at 5 a.m. for several years. Nash and Korin continued to mentor and manage her, took Jones and eventually she had offers from networks. From one pilot script, she got calls from NBC, ABC and CBS. Jones says she has been largely influenced by Black writers from shows like “A Different World,” “Moesha” and “Girlfriends.” Early on in her career, her experience in a meeting with creators of “Moesha” taught her to always be prepared. She came to an informal meeting without a sample script. “They told me don’t ever tell someone you’re a writer and you don’t have a sample,” Jones remembers. She learned from then on to always be fully prepared, even in informal settings. Jones wrote a comedy sample script about her own life, and it garnered her two movies and three shows. She signed with an agent and started to get to the point where she was able to pick
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