Female Education

Ciresi's 14 thought-provoking flash fictions deal with love, loss, and the hard choices women make. Her characters experience great joy and passion; they endure failed marriages, displacement, rejection, and grief. Their narratives are influenced by contemporary ideals of female empowerment, as well as former "female education" practices that attempted to control women. In spare prose, these stories are hilarious, poignant, and sad, and sometimes all at once. Rita Ciresi is author of the novels Bring Back My Body to Me, Pink Slip, Blue Italian, and Remind Me Again Why I Married You, and three award-winning story collections, Second Wife, Sometimes I Dream in Italian, and Mother Rocket.She is professor of English at the University of South Florida, a faculty mentor for the Bay Path University MFA in creative nonfiction, and fiction editor of 2 Bridges Review.