Kent Nerburn is the author of Lone Dog Road and 15 other books on spirituality and Native American themes. He has been praised as "the one writer who can bridge the gap between Native and non-Native cultures." Kent has twice won the Minnesota Book Award. His book, Chief Joseph and the Flight of the Nez Perce, was a New York Times best seller, and his internationally acclaimed Neither Wolf nor Dog, which was the One Book South Dakota selection for 2019, is used in multi-cultural curriculums around the world. Kent is currently serving as cultural liaison to the International Smile Network in their work providing dental and cleft palate surgeries to children on the reservations in South Dakota. Nerburn is widely recognized as one of the earliest advocates for the Own Voices movement. He founded an award-winning multi-racial, multi-cultural newspaper in Minneapolis to "give voice to the voiceless” and created an oral history project on the isolated Red Lake Indian reservation in northern Minnesota where students sat at the feet of the tribal elders to hear and collect their stories.