| Rita Ciresi | |
| Birth Place: | New Haven, Connecticut, U.S. |
| Occupation: | Novelist - Short Stories |
| Education: | Pennsylvania State University (MFA) |
| Period: | 1993–present |
| Subject: | Women's Fiction - Romantic Comedy - Memoir - Illness and Grief |
| Notable Works: | Mother Rocket - Pink Slip - Blue Italian |
| Awards: | 2002 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction - 2017 Jeanne Leiby Memorial Chapbook Series Award |
Rita Ciresi (born in 1961) is an American short story writer and novelist. She is the author of three award-winning novels that address the Italian-American experience.[1]
Ciresi was born in New Haven, Connecticut, a city which serves as the backdrop for most of her fiction. She attended Penn State University, and graduated with an M.F.A.[2]
Ciresi is the author of several novels, short stories, and pieces of flash fiction that have appeared in magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, South Carolina Review, California Quarterly, and Prairie Schooner. She has also had anthologies published by Penguin, Purdue University Press, and Feminist Press. She has written romantic comedies, such as Love on Longboat Key, under the pen name of Meg West. Her fiction has been translated or optioned for translation in German, Dutch, Greek, Polish, and Bulgarian. Ciresi is well regarded for her writing style, and on her novel Pink Slip, she is appreciated for her ability to mix the tragic and the comic aspects of love in a hilarious fashion.[3]
Ciresi has received support from the state arts council of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Florida. She has been in residence at the American Academy in Rome, Hawthornden International Writers' Retreat, Sozopol Fiction Seminars, Martha's Vineyard Writers Residency, Virginia Center for the Arts, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Santa Fe Art Institute, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. She has written the first and final drafts of most of her work at the Ragdale Foundation.[4]
Ciresi has served as a fiction editor of 2 Bridges Review, an annual published by New York City College of Technology. She currently rests as a retired faculty of the University of South Florida, where she was a professor emerita. Her primary mission was to work alongside her prose students in a supportive and nurturing environment to help them produce their visions of a first book. Ciresi served as director of M.F.A. theses that resulted in publication and worked alongside award-winning former students.