Les AuCoin is a retired, nine-term U.S. congressman, author, newspaper columnist and former award-winning public radio commentator. A visiting lecturer of government at Southern Oregon University (Ashland, Oregon), he was named Outstanding Professor of the Year in 2004 by the Southern Oregon University chapter of Phi Kappa Phi, the nation’s largest scholarly society, and was voted as one of four “most popular professors” in a SOU student poll in 2004. He and his wife, Sue, now in their 43rd year of marriage, live Ashland, Oregon, and spend part of each summer in Bozeman, Montana.
At the time he left the Congress, he was 85th in overall senority, dean of the Oregon delegation, a Democratic whip at large, and a senior member of the House appropriations committee and its defense and interior subcommittees. He was an official congressional observor to the Geneva-based Strategic Arms Reduction Talks, and the Helsinki Commission on International Human Rights. He represented Oregon’s First Congressional District—the first Democrat to hold that seat since statehood. Previous political experience: two terms in the Oregon legislature, serving in the second as House majority leader.
His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The Denver Post, the Seattle Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Defense Daily, Army Times, High Country News, Counterpunch, The Oregonian, among other publications. He is a contributing author to Wildfire: A Century of Failed Forest Policy (Island Press, 2006).