Robert Rebein was born and raised in Dodge City, Kansas, the second-youngest of seven sons of a local rancher. Now a writer and a professor and chair of the English Department at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, he revisits his hometown and Kansas’ high plains often in an extensive collection of acclaimed narrative essays.

Rebein folds a collection of those pieces into his third book Headlights on the Prairie: Essays on Home. In a discussion of the book, he reflects on the place that formed him as a writer and a person, a world of feedlot cowboys and stock car drivers as well as young men returning home from war, long-haul truckers addicted to crystal meth, and the sadly heroic residents of a nursing home euphemistically called the Manor of the Plains.