Rosemary Keefe was born on February 3, 1940, in Chicago, Cook County, Illinois to Dorothea Lee (née Gatzmeyer) and Jerry E.

[3][7] Upon completing her university studies, Keefe taught biology and religion at Dominican High School in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin for three years.

[11] She was hired to teach at Missouri Southern State College in 1976 and completed her PhD from the University of Arkansas in 1977 with a dissertation, The Idea of the American Dream in Afro-American Plays of the 1960s.

Curb stated to Marta Poynor, a reporter with The Joplin Globe, that the firing was retaliation to a dispute with an administration official who barred her from using college facilities, specifically the mail room, to do her job.

[14] Curb sought legal advice over the issue because she was attempting to submit an article on lesbianism, which had been inadvertently left in a Xerox machine, for publication when the ban was placed.

[14] A few months later, Curb was elected treasurer of the national organization, The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States and hired to teach at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida.

[5][13] She taught English courses with a special focus on feminist and lesbian theater and founded the women's studies program, which she directed from 1979 to 1992.

[17] It was widely controversial and television stations which featured an interview with Curb and Manahan on the syndicated show Sally Jessy Raphael barred its airing in Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, and San Francisco.

[5] They also were criticized by representatives of the Catholic church and received death threats when they appeared in Dublin on a publicity tour in the United Kingdom.

[2] Keefe underwent a lung transplant at Duke University on April 16, but died from complications on May 24, 2012, in Durham, North Carolina, where she was cremated.

[2][8] According to Tracy Baim, one of the founders of the Windy City Times, Keefe and Manahan's book Lesbian Nuns is "one of the bestselling lesbian books of all time", and has been translated into multiple foreign languages and released in published versions in "Australia, Brazil, Britain, France, Germany, Holland, Ireland, Italy and Spain".