Odessa Rose was born and reared in Baltimore, Maryland, which serves as the backdrop for her fiction. She spent her childhood surrounded by books, for her mother is a voracious reader of horror, in particular Stephen King. When she was nine, Rose read a short story in Reader’s Digest. The eloquent way in which the author wove words into story so fascinated Rose that she was compelled to announce to her mother that she wanted to be a writer. Her mother’s reply was, “Well, write, baby. In 2000 her first novel, Water In A Broken Glass, was published by La Caille Nous Publishing Inc. Water In A Broken Glass was #6 on the “On-Demand Best Sellers” list. Its sales captured the attention of BET Books. It has been recorded for the Maryland School for the Blind. It is on Towson University’s Rainbow Lounge and Resource Library booklist, was used in a graduate level literature course at Wake Forest University, and is mentioned in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Multiethnic American Literature. Accredited Online Colleges ranked Water In A Broken Glass #17 on their 20 Essential Novels For African American Women. Several book clubs have selected Water In A Broken Glass for their monthly read, and it continues to attract new readers. In 2018, Lodge Street Films, an independent film company, released the film version of Water In A Broken Glass. On June 3, 2014, Rose's second novel, In the Mirror, will be published. Rose received her BA in English from Coppin State University and her MA in literature from the University of Maryland at College Park. She is the co-founder of This Is Baltimore, Too, a video project that features the great people and things going on in Baltimore City.