Moss married at age 16 before attending Syracuse University from 1971 to 1973.[2] She eventually left university due to racial tensions and entered the workforce for several years. During this time she had two sons, Dennis and Ansted.[2] She enrolled in Oberlin College in 1979 and graduated with a BA in 1981.[3] She later received a Master of Arts in English, with an emphasis on writing, from the University of New Hampshire.
After finishing school, Moss taught English at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. Since 1993, she has been a Professor of English and a Professor of Art and Design at the University of Michigan[4] in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Her early work is considered part of the legacy of the Black Arts Movement, taking influence from West African praise poetry and concerning themes of racial justice.[5] Throughout her career, her work has become more experimental, stretching the boundaries of genre and the definition of poetry. Her fixations still include justice, but she expanded into a fascination with text placement's effect on meaning.[6] These experiments with form culminated in her development of Limited Fork Theory and the invention of the POAM (product of act of making). Moss's POAMs are combinations of film and poetry, emphasizing how text placement and movement, among other sensory elements, can enhance the meaning of a poem.[6]
