Tom Barrett

Tom Barrett was born and raised in West Orange, New Jersey and first introduced as a young boy to the wider world through National Geographic magazines left by a Norwegian border. Vowing to someday go to the places he saw on his globe and in the pages of magazines, he started by emigrating to Canada in the 1960s and hitchhiking across North America. Ultimately, Barrett would travel and trek in dozens of countries around the world, and even bring his three children backpacking in East and...See more

Tom Barrett was born and raised in West Orange, New Jersey and first introduced as a young boy to the wider world through National Geographic magazines left by a Norwegian border. Vowing to someday go to the places he saw on his globe and in the pages of magazines, he started by emigrating to Canada in the 1960s and hitchhiking across North America. Ultimately, Barrett would travel and trek in dozens of countries around the world, and even bring his three children backpacking in East and Central Africa and later in Nepal and Thailand. Along the way, Barrett completed a BA in political philosophy from the University of Alberta and found a way to make a career out of telling stories, when he became a reporter for the Edmonton Journal. During his 29-year career with the paper, Barrett broke many national and international stories and won the Michener Award for Public Service in Journalism for a series of articles on the use and abuse of psychiatry in the criminal justice system. See less