Richard Denner (aka Jampa Dorje) was born in California in 1941. Uneducated at UC Berkeley, he self-exiled himself to a wilderness cabin in Alaska where he created D Press. There are 408 titles in the backlists. After moving to Ellensburg, Washington, to manage a cattle ranch in 1974, he was the proprietor of Four Winds, a coffee-house bookstore, for many years. In 2008, he moved to Tara Mandala in Colorado to complete a traditional Tibetan three-year retreat. Known as an eccentric poet-monk-scholar, he now resides in Ellensburg, Washington, where he does research at Central Washington University.