Tony Diaz is a writer, teacher, and political activist whose novel The Aztec Love God was chosen by Ishmael Reed as the 1998 winner of the Nilon Award for the Excellence in Minority Fiction. Diaz, founder of Nuestra Palabra: Latino/a Writers Having Their Say, a forum for Latino writers and themes, is also the 1998-99 Visiting Scholar at the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Houston.