CARLOS REYES is an Irish-American poet blessed with an Hispanic name. He is the bard of Cloonanaha (County Clare, Irleand) and a poet in Portland, Oregon. Carolyn Kizer has said: “Mr. Reyes is one of our local and national treasures. His poetry is as clear and strong as his social conscience. One is always struck by his sensual and sensory qualities: the touch, taste, feel, color of things, and his ability to capture a mood, a world, in a handful of lines.” 

Since 1964 Reyes has been the publisher of Trask House Books, has edited several literary reviews, is a founding editors of Hubbub: A Magazine of Poetry, and is on the editorial board of Ar Mhuin na Muice (On a Pig’s Back), a journal of Irish literature, music, and news. Since 1982 he has taught poetry writing in the Artists-in-Schools program, Young Audiences, Writers-in-the-Schools, and Community of Writers in Oregon, Washington, Nevada and Utah. He has been nominated various times for the Pushcart Prize, most recently in 2008. At present, in addition to his almost daily poetry writing, he is compiling the poems for a collected/selected works, which hopefully will appear before his 75th birthday.

TRAVIS CHAMP, Nehalem born and bred, Travis Champ recently released a thirty-poem collection, Old Nehalem Road.

As Nestucca Spit Publisher Matt Love wrote in his introduction to the book, “I first heard Travis Champ read his poetry in January of 2007, at an annual Friends of William Stafford gathering in Lincoln City. He had hitchhiked 80 miles from Manzanita to read one short poem, and when I heard it in a church that winter night, I was transfixed. It voiced the raw wet alienated stuff of what living at the Oregon Coast can do to some people­a perspective few poets had ever conveyed because they had not grown up here, as Travis had. After the reading, I asked him to send me all of his poems with an Oregon connection. I read them and knew at once I wanted to publish them."

Perhaps as equally remarkable is the story of Old Nehalem Road’s production: Champ set all the type for the book, printed its pages on a hundred-year-old press, and bound all three hundred copies of the first edition print run. Old Nehalem Road is available for $15 Nestucca Spit Press.