Kent Nerburn is the author and narrator of Neither Wolf Nor Dog. He was born July 3, 1946, in Minneapolis Minnesota, and spent most of his life in the Great Plains region of the United States. He graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1968 with a degree in American Studies, and completed a Ph.D. in religion and art at the University of California, Berkeley in 1980. After finishing his degree, Nerburn worked primarily as a sculptor, focusing on religious themes in his work. In 1988, Nerburn founded and became the director of an oral history project focused on the Red Lake Ojibwe reservation in Minnesota. Alongside students from Red Lake High School, Nerburn collected and edited oral history from Ojibwe elders, resulting in the publication of To Walk the Red Road (1989) and We Choose to Remember (1991). Neither Wolf Nor Dog was published in 1994. It was followed by two sequels, The Wolf at Twilight (2009), in which Nerburn returns to the reservation to visit Dan and Grover, and The Girl Who Sang to Buffalo (2014), in which Nerburn traces a mysterious disappearance in Grover’s family.

As the narrator of Neither Wolf Nor Dog, Nerburn is characterized by his desire to be seen as a trustworthy white person and his sense of alienation from the indigenous people he encounters.