David Daniel was raised in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Currently he is on the faculty of the Fairleigh-Dickinson low-residency MFA Program in Madison, New Jersey, and is the director of the undergraduate creative writing program at FDU. For over ten years, he was the poetry editor of the literary journal Ploughshares, and taught literature and poetry writing at Emerson College in Boston for many years. His first full-length collection, Seven-Star Bird, was published in October 2003 by Graywolf Press, and distributed by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

David has been called, by Harold Bloom, "an authentic heir to Hart Crane." His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared widely in numerous journals, including Agni, Harvard Review, The Literary Review, Post Road, and Witness. 

He was also president and co-founder of the first independent part-time faculty union in the East—the Affiliated Faculty of Emerson College. 

He received degrees from Vanderbilt University, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Virginia, where he was a Hoynes Fellow. David is also a songwriter. 

He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has two sons, Doc and Wilder.