There are many talented educators who have also earned acclaim as authors. One of these was Rosemary Thomas, a creative writing instructor who also authored and published excellent poetry.

Rosemary was born on February 16, 1901. As a young woman, she earned her Bachelor’s degree from Smith College in 1923. She earned her Master’s degree from Columbia University in 1950.

Rosemary taught creative writing at a number of prestigious schools, including Spence School and Brearley School in New York. She also taught at the Shipley School in Bryn Mawr in Pennsylvania, and Oxford Schooling Hartford, Connecticut.

The talented educator was also a successful poet. Her poems were published in the New York Times, The New Yorker, and in other distinguished magazines. In 1951, Rosemary garnered the Twayne First Book Contest for her inaugural book of poems, Immediate Sun. The book featured a foreword written by celebrated poet Archibald MacLeish, who described her poems as having “a common quality, a characteristic idiom, and inflection the reader would recognize again as a man recognizes the inflection of a decisive voice.” The volume included a poem about her brother-in-law, Canadian tennis star J. F. Foulkes, entitled The Colonel. A second collection of Rosemary’s poems entitled Selected Poems of Rosemary Thomas was published posthumously in 1968.

Rosemary passed away on April 7, 1961, in New York City. In her honor, the English Language and Literature Department at her alma mater, Smith College, awards the Rosemary Thomas Poetry Prize each year to the best poem or group of poems.