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Bill Porter publishes books dealing with Chinese culture and translations of its seminal texts, which he does under the name Red Pine. Bill was born in 1943 in Van Nuys, California and grew up in Northern Idaho. After a tour of duty in the US Army 1964-67, he attended college at UC Santa Barbara and majored in Anthropology. In 1970, he entered graduate school at Columbia University. While he was in New York, he became interested in Buddhism, and in 1972 he left America for a Buddhist monastery in Taiwan. After three years with the monks and nuns, he struck out on his own and supported himself by teaching English and later by working as a journalist at English-language radio stations in Taiwan and Hong Kong. In 1993, he returned to America and has lived ever since in Port Townsend, Washington, where he has worked as an independent scholar writing about Chinese culture and translating Buddhist texts and Chinese poetry. His books dealing with these subjects have been honored with a number of awards, including two NEA translation fellowships, a PEN translation award, the inaugural Asian Literature Award of the American Literary Translators Association, a Guggenheim Fellowship, which he received to support work on Finding Them Gone, and the Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation bestowed by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. More recently, in 2023, he was honored in Beijing with the Special Book Award of China.