Date of Birth
Shawn R. Jones

Winner of the 2022 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry

The poems in this bracing debut do not shy away from incomprehensible tragedies: racism, poverty, abuse and addiction, incest, and infidelities of the body and mind. Yet the world depicted by Shawn R. Jones has moments of humor and playfulness. If Date of Birth is heart-wrenching in its journalistic reporting of suffering, it is also a testament to the strength and resilience of the figures it portrays.

“Humbling, reverent, irreverent and bold, the poems in Shawn R. Jones’s large-hearted debut demonstrate that dignity is not a state of rest. It is a struggle that makes us present to our lives and everyone in them, and it is achieved not just in spite of, but thanks to the tide of horror and beauty, local and global, upon which our lives are continually born.”
—Gregory Pardlo

“From Camden to Ventnor to Atlantic City, Shawn R. Jones offers us the uninhibited specificity of name and memory, summoning poetry’s potential: ‘Every dipthong, and syllable aflame. / Each vowel broken.’ Out of the searing wreckage emerges a deeply personal, elegaic version of America. Date of Birth is a reminder of origins, as we so of often conveniently forget them, but Jones insists we pay attention through a ‘rebirthing’ of danger, intimacy, delusion, and delight.”
—Patrick Rosal

Shawn R. Jones is the author of two chapbooks, Womb Rain and A Hole to Breathe. Her poems have appeared in Essence, New Ohio Review, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. A graduate of the MFA program in Creative Writing at Rutgers-Camden, she grew up in Atlantic City, and lives outside of Philadelphia in southern New Jersey.

Paperback / $15.95 (Can $21.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-569-7 / 80 pages / Poetry