Richard Sutton was born in California in 1952 and has lived in almost every Western State from Idaho, to the coast and from New Mexico, north. After college, he became an Oregon commune guitar-playing goatherd, tree-planter, cannery worker, health food store manager and illustrative artist.  He also found work as a ski mechanic and as a frame carpenter before hitch-hiking to New York in 1973 where he first worked as a receiving manager for a fashion company, then as a ski department manager for Herman's World of Sporting Goods in several locations. By 1976 he'd begun building his career in advertising design, marketing and copy writing, eventually establishing a design studio on Long Island and a side-business in American Indian Arts. He turned Indian Trader full-time in 1989, operating his family business in authentic Native Indian arts successfully for more than 20 years before completing his first novel.

Several of his short stories were first outlined in the margins of his retail; gallery daybook. One of the first of these, Corrales was published in the Journal of The Santa Fe Writers Project. The initial drafts of his first two novels were likewise, written from behind the cash register, during slow spells. To date, he has released two historical fiction novels, a scifi novel and a prehistoric fantasy novel, as well as a mystery written as W.T. Durand that may spin into a western-setting series. He has several projects in the works that will be released, when they're ready for readers' eyes.. He’s also compiling a series of non-fiction stories from his trading days on the reservations of the Southwest. He met his wife on NY's Lower East Side in 1973. They have lived in New York and in New Mexico ever since, enjoying sailing, their family and their cats.
Novels: The Red Gate (2009); The Gatekeepers (2010); Home (2011); Troll (2012); On Parson's Creek (2014); Back to Santa Fe by W.T. Durand (2014)