Baine Kerr is the author of two best-selling legal thrillers, Harmful Intent and Wrongful Death, published by Scribner and Berkley/Jove, and a collection of short stories, Jumping-Off Place, published by the University of Missouri Press. His short story “Rider” was published in Best American Short Stories. He recently completed a new novel, Alamosa, a legal and environmental thriller set near the headwaters of the Rio Grande.

A native of Houston, Kerr is a graduate of Stanford University where he studied creative writing with Pulitzer Prize-winning author and environmentalist Wallace Stegner and achieved early notoriety as a “local boho” at Ken Kesey’s first acid test in Tom Wolfe's book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. He was a founding editor of Place magazine, a literary offshoot of the Whole Earth Catalog. Contributors included Stegner, Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, Robert Stone, and others.

Kerr was  selected by the National Endowment for the Arts for a fellowship in fiction and received the Editor’s Prize from The Missouri Review for fiction. In 2019 he was inducted into The Texas Institute of Letters.

As a trial lawyer, Kerr specialized in medical malpractice for patients, and, for the last twenty years, civil rights claims for children and for students and coaches under Title IX. His national Title IX practice focused on sexual assault by athletes in high-profile cases against the University of Colorado, Arizona State University, Florida State University and Heisman Trophy winner Jameis Winston, and other schools around the country. Kerr’s Title IX work has advanced student safety reforms at many campuses, won appellate precedents, and has been honored at Harvard Law School and elsewhere. Kerr also spent a sabbatical year as an elections supervisor in Bosnia and as a journalist covering the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague.

Kerr and his wife Sally divide time between Colorado and the Big Island, where they enjoy contemplating wilderness views of Longs Peak and the Pacific ocean, respectively, and the passing moose or whale.