H. Bruce McEver has spent the better part of his life building connections between those things about which he is passionate: poetry, literacy, religion, and business.
He holds degrees from Georgia Tech, Harvard Business School, and Harvard Divinity School and is the Founder and Chairman of Berkshire Capital, a multi-national financial services advisory firm that pioneered the concept of providing independent mergers, acquisitions, and strategic advisory services to investment managers and securities firms.
It may come as a surprise to learn that Bruce believes that poetry formed the foundation of his business acumen and success.
Poetry has the capacity to transform and enrich the lives of both writers and readers of poems.
Bruce’s story, although rich in the prelude, begins for our purposes in 1968, the year he graduated from Georgia Tech with a degree in Industrial Engineering, a proficiency in mathematics, a reverence for nature, and, thanks to a great teacher, a newly found passion for poetry. In the intervening years, he has gone on to write three chapbooks and is the author of three books of poetry - Full Horizon (Jeanne Duval Editions, 2005), Scaring Up the Morning (C&R Press, 2013), and Like Lesser Gods (C&R Press, 2017). His poems have appeared in national publications, including Ploughshares, Westview, The Berkshire Review, Courtland Review, The Atlanta Review, and others.
In 2021, Bruce wrote his memoir titled Many Paths (C&R Press). Hailed by John W. Evans, The Phyllis Draper Lecturer in Non-Fiction, Stanford University, he writes: Many Paths begins with a wrenching account of loss, then becomes something somehow even more affecting and profound: a search for truth and meaning in every facet of a life fully lived.
In 2002, giving back to the school that gave so much to him, Bruce, together with Henry C. Bourne, Jr., established Poetry at Tech, working to ensure that in a highly specialized and technological environment, students’ aptitudes in the humanities are nurtured and supported as a foundation for life-long learning. Believing that access to the broader aspects of liberal arts, including poetry, literature, and travel, will better enable students to understand the context and impact of the specialized education they are gaining. The Poetry at Tech program has evolved into one of the premier showcases of poetry in the Southeast.
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