Jan Sumner, president of JaDan Publishing Company was born in Independence, Kansas, but has spent his entire life in Denver, Colorado. He is a graduate of Metropolitan State College in Denver. He has been active in baseball his entire life and in 1993 started throwing batting practice for the Colorado Rockies. He threw for them through the 1999 season and wrote a book about his experiences called Fat Pitch, published in 2001. It's an insightful and humorous behind the scenes look at the Rockies from their first days at Mile High Stadium through their first four years at Coors Field. He then wrote a murder mystery, Death Camass, about a serial killers reach from the grave, haunting lives twenty years after his death. He started his own publishing company, JaDan Publishing Company, at that time, and is now publishing books for other authors.

Jan's latest work is Legacy of a Monarch, the biography of Byron "Mex" Johnson, an All-Star Negro League baseball player of the 1930s-1940s. It is a history of not only a black baseball player, but of an African American's journey through American history.

Jan has also co-authored and published, Face to Face With Sports Legends by Joe Cullinane, When Pro Football Was Fun by Vic Boccard, and The Mental Side of Hitting by Mike Epstein.