Rita Ciresi is the author of the novels Blue Italian, Pink Slip, Remind Me Again Why I Married You, and Bring Back My Body to Me, and the short-story collections, Sometimes I Dream in Italian and Mother Rocket.  

She is professor of English at the University of South Florida in Tampa, a faculty member for the Bay Path University online MFA program in nonfiction, and fiction editor of 2 Bridges Review.

Her awards include the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, finalist for the Los Angeles Times' Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the Barnes and Noble Discover New Writers Series, and the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Prize for the Novel.

Recent short work has appeared in Creative Loafing, Almost Five Quarterly, Hawai'i Pacific Review, Fiction Southeast, Hobart, Medical Literary Messenger, and Works in Progress Journal.

Ciresi has received support from the state arts councils 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 Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. She has written the first and final drafts of most of her work at the Ragdale Foundation.