Dr. Max “Diego” Hunter

Dr. Max “Diego” Hunter is enthusiastic about promoting wellbeing through community engagement. He manages the Community Innovation Hub at the Odessa Brown Children’s Clinic in Seattle, Washington. He also leads as Storyteller-in-Chief at Stories and Theories: A Narrative-Based Approach to Consulting and Life-Coaching. As a health activist, Dr. Max participates in efforts in Seattle’s Central District and South End to promote community-engaged evaluation and measurement guided toward ameliorating social determinants of health and supporting community-defined responses to health disparities among underserved pediatric patients.
 

By removing barriers between physicians, scientists, and the community, he hopes to reduce research fatigue and medical mistrust among community members while pursuing community-defined interventions and best practices in the clinical environment. As the Storyteller-in-Chief at Stories and Theories, he seeks to facilitate personal and professional transformation through engagement with critical theory, literacy analysis, autobiography, and memoir.
 

During the pandemic, Dr. Max revised his award-winning dissertation focusing on Black males experiencing ambivalence regarding identity, Black authenticity, literacy, and masculinity: Speech is My Hammer. Raised in Southern California during the War on Drugs in an era defined by mass incarceration, he began forging an identity as a bookish preppy hustler, presaging the character Stringer Bell on The Wire, which led to his interest in the relationship between erudition and masculinity in Black culture. The book has received praise from members of the Black male literati.
 

Dr. Max hopes to leverage his education, experiences, and social capital to serve the most marginalized communities based on first-hand knowledge of the streets, illiteracy, poverty, and violence. A renowned omnivore and notorious soccer dad, Hunter enjoys cooking, dining out, listening to music with his boys in their convertible VW, and people watching while strolling Alki Beach with his family in West Seattle.