"When I was a student, you couldn't take electives in anything but engineering," says the Atlanta native and 1966 industrial engineering graduate. "We just didn't have electives for a writer, although there were some really great professors who taught me a lot."

One of those professors was James Dean Young, who taught English at Tech for nearly three decades. He inspired in McEver a love of language and an appreciation for self-expression through writing. Several years after graduation, when McEver was already ensconced in a business career in New York City, the nascent curiosity raised in Young's English class prompted McEver to enroll in a poetry writing workshop at the New School in Manhattan. Thirty years later, he's still writing poetry.

"Poetry is compressed emotions," McEver says. "You're trying to transfer an emotional experience or feeling. It takes you someplace you haven't been before or it makes you walk in somebody else's shoes and see things from a different point of view. It's the only art form that can express an interior landscape, so really good poetry gets under your skin. It makes you think."

McEver's writing has drawn critical praise in literary circles. In addition to a collection of poems published last year in "Full Horizon," McEver's work has appeared in several literary magazines.

In 2001, he endowed the writing chair at Tech "to enrich the lives and education of Tech students because they're really bright people and they deserve more."

The rotating chairs teach poetry writing classes, conduct readings, hold poetry workshops for the public and visit area high schools as part of a community outreach program.

The first professor to visit Tech through McEver's program was Lux, a poet from Sarah Lawrence College in New York. Lux and McEver had struck up a friendship several years earlier at the 92nd Street YMCA in New York, where McEver had signed up for one of Lux's poetry classes.

Not long after Lux arrived on campus, the Margaret T. and Henry C. Bourne Jr. chair in poetry was set up by the longtime electrical engineering professor and former interim Tech president. Lux was offered the job.

What is unusual, he notes, is that Tech supports two poetry chairs. "There are maybe only 25 or 30 poetry chairs in the whole country," Lux says. "I don't know of any other college or university that has two of them."

By all accounts, the activities and classroom offerings known collectively as Poetry at Tech enjoy tremendous popularity. Readings given by Lux, visiting poets and local writers routinely draw hundreds of students, according to the professor. A reading this past February by the 2006 McEver chairs, Chard deNiord and Kurtis Lamkin, attracted a standing-room-only crowd to Clary Theater. McEver himself also participated.

"The more people are exposed to it, the more they realize how accessible it can be," McEver says. "That's the purpose of the writing chairs and the Poetry at Tech program. There's a poet for everyone — more than one poet for everyone — if you read around."

©2006 Georgia Tech Alumni Association