Robin Cody

ROBIN CODY grew up along the rivers surrounding Portland, his family moving frequently in the search for financial survival. Robin graduated from Yale, taught at the American School of Paris, in France, then returned to Oregon and became Dean of Admissions for Reed College. He decided, in 1984, to be a writer and penned many feature articles for Northwest Magazine of the Sunday Oregonian. One of those stories won the Western Writers of America’s Silver Spur Award for short non-fiction in 1986.

As a freelance technical writer, Robin joined the Bonneville Power Administration’s Writer’s Pool. One assignment was to write a children’s booklet explaining the Columbia River. The research for that book encouraged Robin to spend a summer solo canoeing from the mouth of the Columbia to the Ocean. A trip that took 82 days. Voyage of A Summer Sun, the book written as a result of that trip, won him an Oregon Book Award.

Voyage of A Summer Sun is historical, giving the geological history of the Columbia. Yet it’s personal, really him, Robin Cody, paddling down and looking through his own particular eyes. He declares he wasn’t an environmentalist when he began his trip and he wasn’t one when he finished it. But he comments on how the dams destroyed the area’s Indians, wild fish runs, and the small towns which were flooded when the water backed up.

Robin’s first book, Ricochet River, a novel, was published by Knopf in 1992.