Kent Haruf was born in Pueblo, CO in 1943. He received a B.A. degree from Nebraska Wesleyan University and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. He served in the U.S. Peace Corps in Turkey and has taught high school English in Wisconsin and Colorado and fiction writing at Nebraska Wesleyan and Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.

His most recent novel, PLAINSONG, is set on the high plains of Colorado and has been widely celebrated. It was a finalist for the National Book Award, the New Yorker Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and the Book Sense Award. It won the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Association Award, the Salon.com Book Award, the Midlands Authors Award, the Alex Award from the American Lbrary Association, and the Evil Companions Award from the Colorado Quarterly. It was selected as a Notable Book of the Year by both The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, was a national bestseller, and has been translated into eight languages.

Haruf is the author of two earlier novels, The Tie That Binds, which received the Whiting Foundation Writers' Award, and Were You Once Belonged, which received the Maria Thomas Award for Fiction. He is the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Grant, and his short fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories.

He is the father of three daughters and he and his wife Cathy live in Colorado.