Pickin Partners

McVay was founding executive director of the Robert Sterling Clark and Geraldine R. Dodge Foundations and the 16th president of the Chautauqua Institution. Among his initiatives are the four-day Dodge Poetry Festival and a Chinese language initiative in high schools across America. A graduate of Princeton, he published a collection of poetry in 2012, Whales Sing and Other Exuberances, and a book, Surprise Encounters with Artists and Scientists, Whales and Other Living Things (Wild River Books) in 2015.