What's Tom up to?
(updated September 9, 2007)
What's Tom reading?
View photos of Tom's family and friends
Why write? Read Tom's contest entry on The Joy of Writing
Old School! Check out two of Tom's yearbook photos from the '80's!
Tired of lyrics about guns, blunts, and booty calls? Read Tom's serious rap about slavery
What are the Top 25 Novels for young people? See Tom's list and send him yours!
What are the Top 25 Albums ever released? See Tom's list and send him yours!
Read Tom's letter to the editor in the Register Guard
Go Ems! Another letter to the editor
Hideout Housewarming party!
Tom Cantwell was born in the Bronx, New York in 1970, but his family moved to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida three years later. Tom was lucky to have some good friends who kept him out of trouble. He didn't begin seriously writing fiction until his junior year at Florida State University. While majoring in English Education, a highlight of Tom's college years was Fiction Workshop with Janet Burroway, a well-regarded novelist and author of the widely used text, Writing Fiction. Soon after, Tom completed his first experimental novel, Kill Your Television (1993).
After graduation, Tom moved to Oregon and worked as an environmental activist, taxi driver, bookstore clerk, and finally as a substitute teacher in Portland and Eugene. During this time he made more good friends, wrote dozens of short stories, completed a personal memoir of his cross-country move, Chasing Sunsets (1996), self-published a book of poems, Portland (1997), and sold articles and poems to "Northwest Music News" and "Rant Magazine."
A member of Willamette Writers, Tom currently teaches language arts and social studies at Cal Young Middle School in Eugene, Oregon. His first young adult novel, The Seminole and the Slave (2004), won Honorable Mention in the Writer's Digest International Self-Published Book Awards contest and is currently available through this website.
Meanwhile, Tom is busy developing a young adult trilogy set in the ancient Roman world. Having completed first drafts of Vesuvius and Gladiator School, Tom is currently at work on the third book, Charioteer.
Tom has two awesome dogs, Daisy and Jax, and he is engaged to marry the most amazing woman on earth, Carley Westling. The wedding is next summer.