Rita Ciresi

Rita Ciresi (born in 1961) is an American short story writer and novelist. She is the author of three 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.

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 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. Ciresi served as director of M.F.A. theses that resulted in publication and worked alongside former students. 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