While Dominican-American literature has not figured as prominently as the other groups in US Latino classifications, Dominicans have recently soared to comprise the fourth-largest Latino population in the United States. In fact, the US Dominican population represents one of the most rapidly growing of all Latino groups. The 2000 Census reported 764,495 Dominicans living in the US, but other studies have shown that the count was not adequately defined and that the population is much higher. By using federal Current Population Survey (CPS) statistics, a count conducted by the Mumford Center at the University of Albany and the North-South Center at the University of Miami identified more than a million Dominican-Americans.

One of the earliest critical overviews of literature in the US published by Latin American-derived peoples was Marc Zimmerman's US Latino Literature (1992). It did not, however, include an entry for Dominican-American literature. Five years later, though, William Luis's Dance Between Two Cultures: Latino Caribbean Literature Written in the United States found space for two chapters on Dominican-American writers, as well as two chapters each on Puerto Rican and Cuban-American writers. In 2000, the Caribbean-focused literary journal Callaloo published a special issue on Dominican-American literature, edited by Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert and Consuelo López-Springfield, which included forty-two contributors. Thus, the diversification of US Latino literary contributions has coincided with the arrival of greater numbers of Dominicans.

In the early 1990s, the only well-known author of Dominican heritage writing in English was Julia Alvarez. As the twenty-first century was ushered in, however, a new generation of Dominican-American novelists burst onto the pages of US Latino literature. This new generation includes Junot Díaz with Drown (1996), Loida Maritza Pérez with Geographies of Home (1999), Nelly Rosario with Song of the Water Saints (2002), and Angie Cruz with Soledad (2001) and Let it Rain Coffee (2005). Nearly all of these novels have also been published in Spanish translation.

Meanwhile, major poets on the island are being discovered in English translation in journals and bilingual anthologies.