Daniel David Moses

Daniel David Moses was a groundbreaking First Nations playwright, poet from Ontario, Canada. He was born and raised on a dairy farm on Six Nations of the Grand River in southern Ontario, the largest First Nations reserve in Canada. Moses gained his undergraduate degree at York University and went on to study for a MFA at the University of British Columbia. In an interview in 2013, he recalled that his father joked that he only received an education in order to escape farm life on the reserve.

His first poem was published in 1974 and, by 1979, Moses had established himself as an independent artist and poet. Over the next 40 years, he wrote over a dozen plays and four poetry collections. His first play, Coyote City, was nominated for a Governor General's Literary Award for drama in 1991. It formed the first play in his City Plays series, which focused on an Indigenous family experiencing the tensions between their rural homeland and living in the city. Moses’ play The Dreaming Beauty went on to win Theatre Canada's National Playwriting Competition and his 1996 play The Indian Medicine Shows won the James Buller Award for Aboriginal Theatre Excellence – Playwright of the Year.

In 2003, Moses became an assistant professor in the drama department at Queens University, going on to become Professor Emeritus in 2019. He was the co-editor of An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English, a comprehensive collection of readings by notable authors, poets, playwrights, and activists from First Nation communities across Canada.

Moses was openly gay and several of his works explore the complexities of Indigenous Queer identities. He died of heart failure in July 2020 at the age of 68.