University College of the North and the Thompson Public Library are jointly presenting a public reading by openly gay aboriginal poet and playwright Daniel David Moses Oct. 29 at the public library.

Moses’ reading begins at 7 p.m.

Kate Taylor of the Globe and Mail once wrote, “Daniel David Moses is a coroner of the theatre who slices open the human heart to reveal the fear, hatred and love that have

eaten away at it.”

Moses, who is Delaware and Tuscarora, grew up on a farm on the Six Nations reserve on the Grand River in Southern Ontario.

“I also claim sisters and brothers among two-spirited people,” Moses said, which has been code since 1990 for being gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered in aboriginal cultures in North America. “I'm a writer of plays, poems, and only occasionally essays and fictions. I distrust the illusions of prose. Those of spoken language, I follow into emotion and/or stories, into an understanding of my home at the centre of the world. 'Breath is the one body' if I dare quote one of my own poems. Someday I will be a storyteller. Meanwhile, I live in Toronto.”

A number of Moses’ poems appear in Seminal: The Anthology of Canada's Gay Male Poets, published in 2007 and edited by John Barton and Billeh Nickerson.

"I write to try to figure out an answer to a question and to stretch my mind in a writer's way." Moses says.