Rita Ciresi was born in New Haven, Connecticut, a city which serves as the backdrop for most of her fiction. Ciresi is the author of three award-winning novels and two short-story collections that address the Italian-American experience.

Her first collection of short stories, Mother Rocket, won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and was a finalist for the 1993 Los Angeles Times' Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction.