# Carlos Lozada (journalist)

Carlos Eduardo Lozada Rodriguez-Pastor (born 1971) is a Peruvian-American journalist and author. He joined The New York Times as an opinion columnist in 2022 after a 17-year career as senior editor and book critic at The Washington Post. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2019 and was a finalist for the prize in 2018. The Pulitzer Board cited his "trenchant and searching reviews and essays that joined warm emotion and careful analysis in examining a broad range of books addressing government and the American experience." He has also won the National Book Critics Circle Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing and the Kukula Award for excellence in nonfiction book reviewing. Lozada was an adjunct professor of political science and journalism with the University of Notre Dame's Washington program, teaching from 2009 to 2021. He is the author of What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era, published in 2020, and The Washington Book: How to Read Politics and Politicians, published in 2024, both with Simon & Schuster.

## Early life

Lozada was born in Lima, Peru to two prominent families on both his mother’s and his father’s side. His family migrated to California when he was a child. He later returned to Peru, where he lived until completing high school. He earned a bachelor's degree in economics and political science from the University of Notre Dame in 1993. In 1997, he graduated from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University with a master's degree in public administration. After graduation, Lozada worked as an economic analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta in Atlanta, Georgia. He is married and has 3 children. On his mother’s side he is the nephew of businessman and politician Carlos Rodriguez-Pastor Sr. and cousin of billionaire businessman Carlos Rodriguez-Pastor, on his father’s side he belongs to the Lozada family.

## Career

In 1999, Lozada became an associate editor of Foreign Policy in Washington D.C., eventually becoming the magazine's managing editor. Lozada was a 2004–2005 Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Business and Economics Journalism at Columbia University in New York. He joined the staff of The Washington Post in 2005 and served as economics editor, national security editor and Outlook editor. He became the paper's nonfiction book critic in 2015. At The New York Times, he is an opinion columnist and was cohost of the weekly "Matter of Opinion" podcast.
Lozada joined the University of Notre Dame Faculty in 2009 as an adjunct professor for the Washington Program, and taught a seminar on American political journalism. He was elected to the Pulitzer Prize Board in November 2019. He has been a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a practitioner in residence at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study. In 2024, he was appointed a visiting professor of the practice for public discourse at the University of Notre Dame's Institute for Ethics and the Common Good.
In 2021, Lozada was named by Carnegie Corporation of New York as an honoree of the Great Immigrants Award.
In 2024, he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.