Daniel Mosquera was born in Los Angeles, California. Spanish was his first language, and as a result, his earliest years in school were challenging. Teachers with no background in second-language acquisition labelled him slow. High school however proved different. In tenth grade he was taught by a teacher who believed in reading’s transformative powers. Class time was given to reading books of a student’s individual choice. Daniel was searching for a book to read. The teacher led him to Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun. Reading, once a drudge, turned into a life-long addiction.

Another push towards language arts came his first year at Los Angeles Valley College where he took two literature courses with Professor Thomas McGuire. Lectures and discussions were dynamic and spellbinding. It was during this period that a dream took shape – to take the pursuit of English to its zenith – the writing of fiction. He spent two decades in Asia teaching and traveling.

Daniel won first-prize, runner-up in an annual short story competition sponsored by the Golden Key National Honor Society. While working in Japan, he published another short story in the English-language Abiko Quarterly. Daniel is a member of the Independent Writers of Southern California and a graduate of UC Berkeley’s Bay Area Writing Project.