Chuck Barrett

Chuck Barrett writes fiction, poems and commentary.

Chuck is a lifelong activist. After several years volunteering in peace, labor and civil rights actions, Chuck undertook a fifteen year career in prison alternatives and reform where he founded and directed two nonprofit organizations in the 70s and 80s.

Chuck then worked for fifteen years in the farm labor movement in staff and consultant positions with the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC), the United Farm Workers (UFW) and with several smaller independent organizations.

Chuck later worked with indigenous and smallholder villages in Mexico, helping to build networks of community-based agriculture and land defense.

Chuck’s published fiction books include, "Slugger," a labor union, baseball scam murder mystery set in the 60s which introduces Ray and Margaret Odle, veterans of the coal wars of the 30s now turned private detectives. "Let The Midnight Special" is a collection of short stories focussed on the contradiction between prison escape and moral redemption. Chuck’s third book, "Blood Red Tomatoes," brings back the Odles in a murder mystery in the fields of Ohio, complete with immigration raids and family farm failures. "Long Run Home," takes two stories from "Midnight Special," and spins them into a short road novel of miraculous adventure, mortal danger and moral quest in which a blind death row escapee cuts a deal for help with an aging hobo, and, pursued by a relentless bounty hunter, they fing refuge from everything but the demands of conscience and the call to return to the victims and face redemption or death.

“Victim Statement of Louella Cheney,” a story in "Let the Midnight Special," was a finalist in the 2025 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Competition.

Chuck was a competitive NM Senior Olympics cyclist and a trombonist in the New Horizons bands of Las Cruces, NM and Tucson, AZ.

He is delightfully married to Melody Sears, an accomplished pastel artist, and lives in the Sonoran desert in Tucson, Arizona.