Tom Caramanno

Before the the hipsters and coffee shops pervaded the neighborhood; before it became a haven for starving artists; before every block was systematically lined with a sushi bar, Astoria, New York was the birth place of Tom Caramanno. Tom grew up as many young men in Italian-American families do: overweight from consuming his grandmother's homemade pizza and pasta on a daily basis. Yet, what he lacked in both athletic accolades and the freedom to shop in children's clothing stores (Don't most ten year-olds wear adult-sized sweatsuits?), he more than made up for in his keen observations of the world around him, as well as his unusually precocious writing style. His heightened sense of alertness drove Tom to begin writing and documenting his life. He kept a notebook with him at all times and soon transitioned to writing short, fictional stories about a range of topics, including ghosts and lesbians (which, he later learned, was not a type of insect...as his ten year-old self had once thought).

Tom's passion for the written word persisted throughout his scholarly pursuits, and he earned a BA in Communications with a concentration in Journalism as an undergraduate. He developed an interest in political communications and completed his senior honors thesis on the "Oprah-fication of the Presidency." Tom subsequently left college and found himself unemployed in the midst of an economic recession. He decided to further his education and pursue a graduate degree in Psychology, which he swore seemed like a good idea at the time. Yet upon completing graduate school, he once again found himself unemployed in the midst of a slightly abated economic recession, but saddled with myriad student loans. Since then, he has been working as a freelance writer, blogger and personal trainer (go figure).

Tom's interests include health and fitness (no longer pasta), politics, LGBTQ issues, international affairs, classic films, classic rock, literature, media criticism, media ecology and writing spiffy biographies. Tom is currently penning a memoir and in the coming year, he plans on returning to school for a second Masters degree in Journalism, or to complete his doctorate in Psychology, since those pathways are so strikingly related. Tom is privileged to write for Huff Post, and hopes the editorial staff does not hold his lack of sophisticated credentials against him. Or at the very least, that the staff becomes so smitten with him that they overlook said lack of credentials entirely.