Rita Ciresi is author of the novels Bring Back My Body to Me, Blue Italian, Pink Slip, and Remind Me Again Why I Married You; the story collections Sometimes I Dream in Italian and Mother Rocket; and the flash fiction collections Female Education and Second Wife. 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, the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Prize for the Novel, and the Jeanne Leiby Chapbook Contest. 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. She is professor emerita of English at the University of South Florida in Tampa.