Todd Tarbox was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1944. He attended the Todd School for Boys in Woodstock until it closed in 1954.
He graduated from the University of the Americas in Mexico, D.F., and received a master’s degree from Harvard University.
Life Magazine featured his first-year teaching experience in “We Love You, Mr. Tarbox,” an article highlighting his creative approach to heightening the imagination of children. While attending Harvard, Tarbox and his wife, Shirley, started Tarbox Books to expand his goals as an educator. Describing the launch of the company, Harvard Magazine wrote, “Todd Tarbox is a man with a dream: ‘I want kids to think of the written word not just as something done in a classroom, but something that can be done in their rooms, something that can be done on a walk in the woods.’ His avowed goal, to ‘allow children to be coauthors,’ has inspired both children and adults to make up their own books.”
He is the co-editor with his wife of Footprints of Young Explorers and the author of See the World, Imagine, and Orson Welles and Roger Hill: A Friendship in Three Acts.
Tarbox edited and wrote a Shavian introduction to the play Marching Song concerning the firebrand abolitionist John Brown written by seventeen-year-old Orson Welles and Roger Hill; published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2019.
Tarbox lives with his wife and Saint Bernard, Schnapps, in Colorado Springs, Colorado.