Emerging BIWOC Poet Spotlight: Shawn R. Jones
This monthly series features poems by women of color in the early stages of their publishing careers. It is our intention to create more space at Perugia for the work of poets who are Black, Indigenous, and women of color (BIWOC). We hope using our platform to highlight this work will expand the readership of the poets we spotlight. This series aligns with Perugia’s mission to celebrate and support emerging women poets, inclusive of gender-expansive identities; featured poems will be from poets with no more than one published full-length collection. We’d love to hear from readers with suggestions for poems & poets to feature.
February 2025 Poet: Shawn R. Jones
Seven
For my mother
Under a crippled limb tree, held by two slabs
of slanting wood, behind a single chained fence
hooked to rusty metal poles with jagged heads
and chipped green paint, in balding grass
and cold cracked-gray dirt, I fought green-eyed
Ella as the neighborhood kids cheered her on.
Then I saw my mother, slender and brown,
come out the screened door of our red brick apartment
with one hand on the hip of black slacks. I remember
her tight cheekbones, arched nostrils, charcoal
wavy hair, shadowing her right eye, falling over
a gray turtleneck shirt onto confident shoulders,
and that mole, standing on glossy lips, stoned
by anger as her dark eyes with horse lashes
dammed my tears and owned that moment
when her deep voice cheered me on.
Source
Date of Birth, Persea Books, 2023
Poet bio
Shawn R. Jones was born in Hartford, Connecticut and grew up in Atlantic City, New Jersey. She is a 2023 Civitella Ranieri Fellow, and her poetry collection, Date of Birth, won the 2022 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry. She is also the author of two poetry chapbooks: Womb Rain (2008) and A Hole to Breathe (2015). Her work has appeared in, or is forthcoming from, Tri-Quarterly, New Ohio Review. Callaloo, Cider Review, Obsidian, Passengers Journal, Rattle, Essence, and elsewhere.
Shawn is the co-owner of Tailored Tutoring LLC and Kumbaya Academy, Inc., a dance instructor at Halliday Dance, and a member of the Langston Hughes Society and the poetry performance troupe, No River Twice. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and an MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers-Camden. When she is not writing, dancing, or teaching, she enjoys spending time with her family and her lucky pit bull, Ross.