Bill Porter assumes the pen name Red Pine for his translations. He was born in Los Angeles in 1943 and grew up in Northern Idaho. He served a tour of duty in the U.S. Army, graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and attended graduate school at Columbia University. Uninspired by the prospect of an academic career, he dropped out of Columbia in 1972 and moved to a Buddhist monastery in Taiwan. Following four years with the monks and nuns, he struck out on his own, eventually working at English-language radio stations in Taiwan and Hong Kong, which afforded him the opportunity to travel extensively throughout China. He has visited the homesteads and graves of all the major poets in this collection, as well as the places where they wrote many of these poems. A Chinese translation of his book Road to Heaven has re-inspired Chinese interest in their own hermit tradition.
In recent years, Bill Porter has devoted himself to the translation of Buddhist texts. Currently, he is is working on the Heart and Lankavatara sutras.