Joshua “Josh” Moore, 46, of Sioux Falls, SD, passed away on Tuesday, May 5, 2026.
A Memorial Service will be at 1:00 p.m. on Friday, May 29, 2026, at Schriver’s Memorial Chapel, Aberdeen.
A time for fellowship and luncheon will follow the service at Schriver’s Memorial Fellowship Center.
Schriver’s Memorial Mortuary and Crematory, 414 5th Avenue NW, Aberdeen, is honored to serve the Moore family. Friends and family may sign the online guestbook at www.schriversmemorial.com. Services will be recorded and posted on Schriver’s Facebook following the service.
Born in Bismarck, North Dakota, on July 3, 1979, to Michael J. Moore and Joyce Marie (Leier) Moore, Josh was a brilliant mind, a prolific poet, a musician, and a deeply original soul whose life and work were rooted in the landscapes, humor, weather, and contradictions of the American Midwest.
From an early age, Josh’s gifts for language, intellect, and performance were unmistakable. During his years at Aberdeen Central High School, he earned recognition in speech, debate, and poetry, including honors in State Student Congress, Poetry Interpretation, and statewide literary competitions. As a young writer, he received national recognition as a finalist in Princeton University’s Secondary School Poetry Contest and was published in South Dakota literary publications, including Prairie Winds.
A national debate champion affectionately nicknamed the “walking encyclopedia,” Josh possessed a fierce intellect, a restless wit, and a relentless curiosity about the world. He attended South Dakota State University, where he is believed to have earned a degree in communications, and also spent time studying at Northern State University and the University of Minnesota. He had a way of turning a conversation into a journey — sometimes through history, sometimes through philosophy, and sometimes through a side door nobody else had noticed, which was often where the better conversation was hiding.
Josh’s life and writing were marked by movement, memory, and a lifelong search for home. His father’s military service, including time overseas, gave Josh a deep awareness of distance, duty, place, and the question of where a person truly belongs. Josh traveled widely in his own life and carried those places with him, but again and again his poetry returned to the Great Plains. In poems reaching across South Dakota, Sioux Falls, Aberdeen, Rapid City, Mitchell, Pine Ridge, Minnesota, Colorado, Montana, North Dakota, New Mexico, and beyond, he turned highways, ghost towns, hard weather, rivers, state lines, and prairie towns into an emotional road map.
A true prairie-and-city writer, Josh wrote in the spirit of dirt roads, drawing from working-class storytelling, cowboy poetry, philosophical reflection, humor, and deeply vulnerable lyricism. His poems — including South Dakota by Joshua Moore, Josh Moore Montana, Josh Moore North Dakota II, Joshua Moore Minnesota, Josh Moore Colorado, Still Blinking, Confessional Booth Number 9, and Unrequited — honored not only places, but people. He often wrote dedications, elegies, and named portraits of those who crossed his path, carefully preserving the humanity he encountered along the way. In one of his poems, South Dakota became, in Josh’s own unmistakable shorthand, “Four faces / ten cows / 40 people / a river runs through it.” It was funny, sharp, loving, and entirely his.
Music was equally central to Josh’s life. Family and friends will remember the many guitars that passed through his hands, the hours spent playing and listening, and the way music became another language through which he expressed himself. His love of sound, rhythm, and feeling lived in both his music and his poetry.
Josh’s humor was vivid, strange, protective, and wonderfully his own. He could be surreal, tender, pointed, and completely unexpected — sometimes all in the same sentence, which made sense once you realized the sentence had been doing its best. He used wit like a spark, and sometimes like armor, to meet a world that could feel too rigid, too indifferent, or too quick to misunderstand sensitive people.
Beneath that humor was a deeply vulnerable soul who cared intensely about fairness, dignity, and how human beings are treated when life places them under strain. Josh noticed fractures others walked past. He questioned what did not make sense. He kept trying to communicate, even when the world did not always know how to listen.
At his best, Josh had a dynamic presence that drew people in. He made friends through humor, intelligence, persistence, and a refusal to stop searching for meaning. Even when life narrowed his choices or made the road harder than it should have been, Josh kept moving, kept writing, kept questioning, and kept reaching toward connection.
Above all, Josh valued authenticity, independence, and family. He carried deep pride in his Germans from Russia heritage, his Irish heritage, his Midwestern roots, and the resilience passed down through generations.
Josh navigated the world with profound awareness, transforming both struggle and wonder into art. As he once wrote in his poem Still Blinking:
“By random divinity A pure dream unfolds Where soul meets body In nature’s womb”
He is survived by his parents, Michael and Joyce; his brothers, Joseph and Jacob; his three nephews and one niece; his Grandmother Lugard; and many beloved extended family members and friends.
May he be remembered with love, understanding, humor, and peace.
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