Charles Barber is a nonfiction author who writes about contemporary healthcare and criminal justice issues, for both popular and scholarly audiences. 

Charles Barber is the author of five nonfiction books:  Songs from the Black Chair: A Memoir of Mental Interiors (University of Nebraska Press, 2005), Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry is Medicating a Nation (Random House, 2008), Citizen Outlaw: One Man's Journey from Gangleader to Peacekeeper (HarperCollins, 2019), Peace & Health: How a Group of Small-Town Activists and College Students Set Out to Change Healthcare (OctoberWorks, 2022);  and In the Blood: How Two Outsiders Solved a Centuries-Old Medical Miracle and took on the U.S. Army (Grand Central, 2023).  His work has appeared in The New York TImes, The Washington Post, The Nation, Salon, and Scientific American MIND, as well as in scholarly journals and books on psychiatry and criminology.  Before becoming a full-time writer and a teacher, he worked for many years with the homeless in New York City and in the corrections system in Connecticut. 

He has a B.A. from Harvard University and an M.F.A. from Columbia University.