Maurice Thomas

Maurice Thomas is a native of Union County, NC and emeritus professor of Wingate University where he taught English and creative writing for many years. He is married to Dr. Pamela Reeves Thomas, a professor of English at Wingate. The Thomases have spent a great deal of time in London and the British Isles as supervisors of the University's study abroad program. These trips along with a family home in the Blue Ridge Mountains are the source of much of Thomas' poetry and images. On one visit to London the Thomases traveled to Blandford Forum along the Stour River in Dorset, England, where the Reeves patriarch Robert Ryves (1490-1551)lived and owned the Greyhound Inn on Market Square, Damory Court, and near by Ranston. He and family members are buried in a crypt beneath St. Peter St. Paul Church of Blandford. It was his great grandson Henry and wife Elizabeth Bagnell who came to America in 1664 and settled on the Rappahannock River in Virginia. In 1767 their grandson George moved his family into the colony's southwestern frontier. He was a farmer who fought in the American Revolution and father of eleven children including son George Jr. who moved across New River with wife Elizabeth Osborne into what became Alleghany County, NC. Their sons fought in the Civil War. It is a familar American story. The branches of the Reeves with those of thousands of other immigrant families have spread across the country, twisting, intertwining, creating the complex American canopy. The Thomas children are Colin who died in 2010 and Lauren who works in TV and film in Los Angeles. Thomas' BRANCHES captures this intertwining in beautiful poems and images.