Wild River Books: Surprise Encounters by ScottMcVay

October 1, 2015

Wild River Books to Publish

SURPRISE ENCOUNTERS with Artists and Scientists, Whales and Other Living Things by Founding Executive Director of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Scott McVay

OCTOBER 1, 2015

Memoir features over 150 vignettes, provocative encounters with pathfinders

chronicling decades of enduring philanthropic work

PRINCETON, New Jersey: Wild River Books announced today that it will publish Surprise Encounters by Scott McVay, named “the Money Man for Inspirations” by the New York Times and whose career reflects grant-making as Founding Executive Director of the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation and the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. His passion for addressing critical issues fit well at the Chautauqua Institution when he became President there and led its programming. The book will be released officially on October 1, 2015.

Surprise Encounters invites readers to engage in McVay’s inspiring and provocative encounters with explorers—whether artists or scientists—who have opened new ways of seeing the world and our place in it. Through wide-ranging stories with renowned figures devoted to transformative change, McVay also shows the challenge of placing funds—a sacred charge—in education, the arts, conservation, and the welfare of animals.

Urged by friends and colleagues to set down his recollections, he penned Surprise Encounters, a chronology of more than 150 vignettes written in the spirit of Boccaccio’s Decameron and including titles such as “Even if You Change Your Clothes, the Killer Whale Will Remember You,” “If Knowledge of the Universe Were a Ladder of One Hundred Rungs,” “That which Is Alive I Praise,” “Don’t Worry about Snakes,” and “Twelve Words that Altered Destiny”. Readers sit in on riveting conversations, light-bulb moments, breakthroughs, and lighthearted but hard-hitting yarns about McVay’s eight decades spent at what can be described as an ambassador of goodwill.

With wit, discernment, and feeling, McVay unfolds his life story, from his Princeton University years as the first recording secretary and assistant to President Robert F. Goheen—who brought about the admission of women in 1969—to his research on dolphins and whales, from service on the boards of the World Wildlife Fund and the Smithsonian Institution to creating the Dodge Poetry Festival.

In addition to leading two foundations, McVay served twenty years on the board of the W. Alton Jones Foundation, whose bold aims were striving to maintain biological diversity and reducing the nuclear threat. He was the first of what is now a cohort of outside trustees at the Knowles Science Teaching Foundation.

Among the tales McVay recounts are his discovery of the song of the humpback whale; his fight to reduce and stop the killing of whales; and his leadership of two expeditions to study, record, and film the majestic bowhead whale in the Alaskan Arctic, crowned by the National Film Board of Canada’s award-winning documentary In Search of the Bowhead Whale. His undertaking for the Dodge Foundation of a nationwide initiative in teaching Mandarin in high schools has led today to more than 1,000 American schools that offer it.

A champion of the arts and conservation, particularly in his home state of New Jersey, he cites the stubborn challenges and joys of working in philanthropy. From his leadership of the Chautauqua Institution, which offers 2,100 events every summer, to his and his wife Hella’s creation of the Poetry Trail in Greenway Meadows in Princeton, McVay’s life has been filled with adventures that range from Japan to Russia and pole to pole across the seemingly disparate yet surprisingly interconnected worlds of science, politics, the humanities, and the arts.

Scott McVay is a graduate of Princeton University in English literature. A committed contributor, McVay has served on two dozen boards including The Endocrine Disruption Exchange, Bat Conservation International, Earth Policy Institute, and Grounds for Sculpture. McVay’s honors include receipt of the Albert Schweizer Award from the Animal Welfare Institute, the Joseph Wood Krutch medal from the Humane Society of the United States, the Princeton University Class of 1955 Award, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Award by the White House Commission of Presidential Scholars, the New Jersey Council of the Humanities Citizen of the Year 1998, and an honorary doctorate from Middlebury College.

“Entering into Scott McVay’s memories, and life, is a bit like entering one of those collections that used to be called a Cabinet of Curiosities, in which art married science, beauty married oddity, and factual married fantastic––except that everything in these pages’ stories, photographs, and poems is grounded in the real.”

Jane Hirshfield, Author of Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World

Wild River Review

Kimberly Nagy

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In 2006, Kimberly Nagy founded Wild River Review with Joy E. Stocke; and in 2009, they founded Wild River Consulting & Publishing, LLC. With more than twenty years in the field of publishing, Nagy specializes in market outreach and digital media strategies as well as crafting timeless articles and interviews. She edits many of the writers who appear in the pages of Wild River Review, as well as clients from around the world.

Kimberly Nagy is a poet, professional writer, and dedicated reader who has interviewed a number of leading thinkers, including Academy-Award winning filmmaker, Pamela Tanner Boll, MacArthur Genius Award-winning Edwidge Danticat, historian James McPherson, playwright Emily Mann, biologist and novelist, Sunetra Gupta and philosopher Alain de Botton.

Nagy is an author, editor and professional storyteller. She received her BA in history at Rider University where she was influenced by professors who stressed works of literature alongside dates and historical facts–as well as the importance of including the perspectives of women and minorities in the historical record. During a period in which she fell in love with writing and research, Nagy wrote an award-winning paper about the suppression of free speech during World War I, and which featured early 20th century feminist and civil rights leader, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.

Nagy continued her graduate studies at University of Connecticut, Storrs, where she studied with Dr. Karen Kupperman, an expert in early contact between Native Americans and the first European settlers. Nagy wrote her Masters thesis, focusing on the work of the first woman to be accepted into the Connecticut Historical Society as well as literary descriptions of Native Americans in Connecticut during the 19th century. Nagy has extensive background and interest in anthropological, oral history and cultural research.

After graduate school, Nagy applied her academic expertise to a career in publishing, in which she worked for two of the world’s foremost publishers—Princeton University Press and W.W. Norton—as well as at Thomson, Institutional Investor Magazine, Routledge UK, and Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic.

WEBSITE: www.kimnagy.com
EMAIL: knagywrr@gmail.com
FACEBOOK: http://www.facebook.com/iknagy?ref=profile”
TWITTER: kimnagy

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