Bill Porter (Red Pine)

Bill Porter (Red Pine) was born in Los Angeles in 1943 and grew up in Northern Idaho. After a tour of duty with the US Army, he attended college at UC Santa Barbara, where he graduated with a degree in anthropology in 1970. While attending graduate school at Columbia University, he became interested in Buddhism, and in 1972 he moved to a Buddhist monastery in Taiwan. After more than 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 he has lived ever since in Port Townsend, Washington, where he has supported himself as an independent scholar. Over the past thirty-five years, he has published twenty books containing his translations of Buddhist texts and Chinese poetry as well as accounts of his travels in China. In addition to two NEA translation fellowships, a PEN translation award, the inaugural Asian Literature Award of the American Literary Translators Association, he has also been honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship, which he received to support work on Finding Them Gone, an account of a pilgrimage to the graves and homes of China’s greatest poets of the past.