There, Moore read and wrote prolifically, which she credits with helping her overcome the trauma she experienced during the war. Subsequently, the Moore family moved to Houston, Texas. She flew to Sierra Leone, where she eventually found a female fighter who was able to locate the rest of the family and bring them across the border. At the time, Moore's mother was studying at Columbia University on a Fulbright scholarship, and had no news of her family's fate. To protect the children from the horrors of the war, Moore's father and grandmother created a magical narrative for them in which gunshots were 'dragons fighting' and dead bodies were 'people sleeping on the road'. When she was five years old, Moore's family fled their home in Monrovia to escape the First Liberian Civil War.

Her father is a professor of engineering and Dean of The College of Engineering at the University of Liberia. Her mother is a professor of English, and the founding Dean of Liberia Honors College at the University of Liberia. She is of mixed Vai, Gola and Americo-Liberian ancestry. In 2011, Moore founded a publishing house and nonprofit organization, One Moore Book, which publishes and distributes books intended for children in countries underrepresented in literature. Moore's memoir, The Dragons, The Giant, The Women, was named a 2020 New York Times Notable Book, a Time Magazine 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2020, and a Publishers Weekly Top 5 Nonfiction Books of 2020. She was awarded a Lannan Literary Fellowship for fiction in 2019. Moore has published work in The New York Times, The Paris Review, Guernica Magazine, The Atlantic, and other journals. The novel was positively reviewed by Time Magazine, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. Her debut novel, She Would Be King, was published by Graywolf Press in September 2018, and was named a best book of 2018 by Publishers Weekly, Booklist, Entertainment Weekly & BuzzFeed. Wayétu Moore (born 1985) is a Liberian-American author and social entrepreneur.

She Would Be King by Wayétu Moore