Rose Rappoport Moss was born in Johannesburg and raised in South Africa. In 1964, she came to Cambridge, MA and now lives a few streets away from the house she slept in her first night in the United States.  She worked in publishing and, after some years, returned to teaching and writing fiction. She interrupted her longest stints teaching, at Wellesley College, for nine years, and Harvard Law School and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism for nineteen years, to earn an MBA at Boston University and then, for a while, to earn “real money” as a management consultant.  In 1988, she returned to South Africa to observe and write about a treason trial mounted against internal leaders of the opposition to apartheid and in February, 1989, published a long essay claiming apartheid essentially over.  Less than a year later, Mandela walked out of his prison.

Rose Rappoport Moss has traveled to six continents and has fiction translated into Nama, Spanish and Finnish.  She writes and publishes fiction and non-fiction about politics, memory, travel, food and gardens. The New Fiction Society featured The Terrorist (also known as The Schoolmaster). Scribner's published, The Family Reunion, and it was short-listed for a National Book Award. Penguin published a collection of her stories as a Modern Classic. In 2016 Comares published a Spanish translation and in 2017 the University of Malaga hosted an international web conference on the fiction of Rose Rappoport Moss. 

In 2018 she has published pieces in Commonweal, Gastronomica, and Jewish Fiction.