Rosa Mavins Bogar was born in Orangeburg, South Carolina. She later moved to Syracuse, New York, then to Minneapolis in 1966. She worked as an educator for Minneapolis Public Schools, then later as a fashion designer and a poet. She is the author of Black Woman Sorrow: Oral Poetry (1983), Rosa, and Other Poems: Oral Poetry (2006), and South Carolina's Blacks: A Great Migration to New York City during the Segregated South (2010, 2016).

Rosa Bogar passed away on September 2, 2018 in Minneapolis, Minn.