Brenda Payton Jones started her career in newspapers at the New Bedford Standard Times in 1975. She then worked at the Boston Phoenix, SF Examiner, and Oakland Tribune. She wrote a thrice-weekly column for the Tribune for 26 years, focusing on local politics and social justice. For the past 10 years she has been a freelance writer. At the Mesa, Brenda worked on a family memoir about her grandparents who were educators and homesteaders in the southwest in the early 1900s.