Rita A. Moore

Rita Anne Moore lives in the midwestern United States. A former K-12 public school teacher, she earned a PH.D in education, moving on to become an award-winning teacher researcher and educator of over thirty years. She has published multiple books on literacy education and over thirty-six articles about her work in classrooms. As a retiree, she chose a new avocation: writing young adult fantasy and adult crime thriller fiction. An avid reader, since age eight when she’d sneak her mother’s Agatha Christie novels under the covers at bedtime, she's always loved the crime thriller genre. After a career in teaching, she decided to try her hand at writing fiction with a nod toward strong female characters.

School for the Dead (2014) is her debut fantasy novel about a special place for exceptional children who are dead. A Thread of Crimson (2016) is Moore's first adult thriller introducing the gutsy Josie Adams, an FBI special agent who solves the mystery of her sister's finance's perplexing murder mired in family secrets. Redemption, (2018) the second in the fantasy series of A School for the Dead tells how a blind teen girl is used by her mother as a decoy for kidnapping innocent children and how a few clever dead kids saved them.

Moore's second thriller is Duplicity (2022), the story of a mother's betrayal, another of the Josie Adams FBI series. Her third adult book is a psychological thriller: Fifteen: My Name is Midnight (2020). Fifteen was born from stories on the growing number of child brides in the United States. An Appalachian Love Story (2021), Moore's sixth book, is an FBI thriller introducing new agents. It is based on the complicated history of a love story between a coal baron's son and a coal miner's daughter.

And finally, Moore transitions into the realm of non-fiction (2023) with Moving Toward the Light, a true story about the friendship between a young, incarcerated woman determined to turn her life around and her older pen pal, a woman who shared some early life experiences with that of her young pen pal. Authentic letters document their history.

She resides with her husband of thirty years in the Midwest.