Carlos Lozada grew up straddling two cultures, as his family moved between Peru and California several times, starting when he was three years old. After college, he stayed in the United States, living here as a permanent resident for nearly four decades before becoming a citizen in 2014.
“The 2016 election marked my first vote, one I cast with excitement but also a sobering sense of responsibility; my dreams were not just for me now but also for my young American children,” he said.
Lozada is the nonfiction book critic at the Washington Post. In 2019, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism for his “trenchant and searching essays and reviews that joined warm emotion and careful analysis in examining a broad range of books addressing government and the American experience.” He was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2018. An adjunct professor of political journalism for the University of Notre Dame’s Washington Program, Lozada is the author of What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era.
In his reviews, Lozada has reflected on his immigrant roots. “It is the lot of the immigrant to straddle borders of all kinds at all times,” he wrote in 2018. “We gaze back with nostalgia and relief, we look forward with boundlessness and insecurity, we strive to belong even when we get the hint.”
