Kent Haruf grew up on the high plains of northeastern Colorado. He was Educated at Nebraska Wesleyan University and The University of Iowa. He served in the Peace Corps in Turkey, teaching English as a second language to middle school kids in a village on the Anatolian Plateau.

Besides that, over the years, he's worked at a variety of other places: a chicken ranch in Colorado, the Royal Gorge in the Rocky Mountains, a construction site in Wyoming, the railroad tracks in southeastern Montana, a pest control company in Kansas, a rehabilitation hospital in Denver, an orphanage in Montana, a surgery wing in a hospital in Phoenix, a presidential library in Iowa, an alternative high school in Wisconsin, a country school in Colorado, and a college in Nebraska. Since 1991 he's been at SIUC where he teaches fiction writing and forms of fiction classes to graduates and undergraduates.

Haruf (pronounced so that it rhymes with sheriff) is the author of two novels: The Tie That Binds and Where You Once Belonged. His short fiction has appeared in Puerto Del Sol, Grand Street, Prairie Schooner, and Gettysburg Review, and has been included in Best American Short Stories and Where Past Meets Present: Modern Colorado Short Stories. His awards included the American Library Association Distinguished Book List, the PEN-Hemingway Foundation Special Citation, a Whiting Foundation Writer's Award, and the Maria Thomas Award in Fiction. His third novel, Plainsong, has just been published.

From these unsettled lives emerges a vision of life, and of the town and landscape that bind them together--their fates somehow overcoming the powerful circumstances of place and station, their confusion, curiosity, dignity and humor intact and resonant. As the milieu widens to embrace fully four generations, Kent Haruf displays an emotional and aesthetic authority to rival the past masters of a classic American tradition.

Utterly true to the rhythms and patterns of life, Plainsong is a novel to care about, believe in, and learn from.