What is "rose moss"

n. widely cultivated in many varieties for its fleshy mosslike foliage and profusion of brightly colored flowers [syn: sun plant, Portulaca grandiflora]

Rose Rappoport Moss is an American writer born in South Africa. She has published novels, short stories, words for music and nonfiction.

Moss was born in Johannesburg, and has lived in the United States since 1964.

In Court, a collection of her short stories, appeared as a Penguin Modern Classic in 2007. She has published two novels, The Family Reunion (1974), short-listed for a National Book Award, and The Terrorist (1979, published as The Schoolmaster in South Africa in 1981). A non-fiction book, Shouting at the Crocodile (1990) presents two defendants, Popo Molefe and Mosiuoa Lekota, in the Delmas Treason Trial during the last days of apartheid. In 2008, Lekota became a prime mover of a new political party in South Africa, the Congress of the People, COPE.

Among her more than forty short stories one won a Quill Prize from the Massachusetts Review and another a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. Several have been cited in Best American Short Stories, been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, selected for anthologies and translated.

Her non-fiction has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the Atlantic Monthly, and other similar publications and in scholarly journals. She is a contributing associate for the Harvard Review.

She teaches at Harvard Law School and the Real Colegio Complutense and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. She is a member of PEN American Center and has served on the Freedom to Write Committee of PEN New England and as a judge for the PEN Winship Award for fiction. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and blogs on the Nieman Watchdog site.