Rita Ciresi

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.

Early life and career
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.

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.

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.

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.

Collections and Novels

 * Mother Rocket (University of Georgia Press, 1993)
 * Blue Italian (Ecco Press, 1996)
 * Pink Slip (Delacorte Press, 1998)
 * Sometimes I Dream in Italian (Delta Publishing, 2000)
 * Remind Me Again Why I Married You (Delta Publishing, 2003)
 * Bring Back My Body to Me (2012)
 * Second Wife (Burrow Press, 2018)

Meg West's Romantic Comedies

 * Love on Longboat Key (The Keys to His Heart, Book 1) (Champagne Book Group, 2017)
 * Love on Lido Key (The Keys to His Heart, Book 2) (Champagne Book Group, 2018)
 * Love on the Links (The Keys to His Heart, Book 3) (Champagne Book Group, 2019)

Awards

 * Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers Series for Blue Italian
 * 1993 Finalist for the Los Angeles Times' Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction
 * 1997 Pirate's Alley Faulkner Award for Fiction for Pink Slip
 * 2002 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction for Mother Rocket
 * 2017 Jeanne Leiby Memorial Chapbook Series Award for Second Wife
 * 2019 F(r)iction Creative Writing Award for  'merigan
 * 2022 Accenti Writing Contest Prize for Anywhere in the World

Fiction

 * Reason for Return (Hawai'i Pacific Review, 2014)
 * Research claims (Almost Five Quarterly, Winter 2015)
 * Disposal (Juked, 2018)
 * Anywhere in the World (Accenti, 2022)

Non-Fiction

 * Clock Clock Clock (Medical Literary Messenger, Spring 2014)
 * Enormous Men (Tahoma Literary Review, Spring 2018)
 * Two Views of Florida (Aquifer: The Florida Review Online)
 * One Morning in Maine (Creative Nonfiction, 2023)

Anthologies

 * Don't Tell Mama! (Penguin Books, 2002)
 * The Milk of Almonds (Feminist Press, 2002)
 * The Italian American Reader (HarperCollins Publishers, 2003)
 * Make Mine a Double: Why Women Like Us Like to Drink (Or Not) (University Press of New England, 2011)
 * 15 Views Volume II: Corridor (Burrow Press, 2013)