Rita Plush holds a BA in Liberal Arts and an MA in Creative Writing from Queens College. She lives and writes in Queens and East Hampton.

Her writing practice includes both fiction and nonfiction, and she is the book reviewer for Fire Island News. The author of the novel, Lily Steps Out (Penumbra Publishing 2012), and the short story collection, Alterations (Penumbra 2013), her upcoming novel, Feminine Products has been accepted for publication and is in the editing process.

During her forty-year career as an interior designer, Rita was the Coordinator of the Interior Design Decorating Program, Queensborough Community College, Continuing Ed.

She continues on the faculty, teaching classes in interior design, and a creative writing workshop called, Object Lessons.

A sought after speaker, Rita has presented at libraries and synagogues, at Hofstra University, CW Post Hutton House, and Guild Hall in East Hampton, on topics ranging from writing and publishing, the decorative arts, interior design and Coco Chanel ~ The Woman-The Legend."

She is a frequent guest on the on-line blogs, Boomer Café, Dames of Dialogue, and Best Chick Lit, and the Guest Words column in The East Hampton Star. Frequently interviewed on Blog Talk Radio, she is scheduled to be heard on The Author's Corner, for Public Radio, The Writer's Dream, on LTV, Reading With Robin, available on iTunes, and The Amy Beth Arkway Show.

Visit her News & Events page http://www.ritaplush.com and on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/ritaplush.

Many of these stories hark back more than fifty years, unwritten stories that lived in me the way stories do, as a bit of memory–a certain smell, the turn of a head, or the particular sound of a voice. Or, in the case of "Love, Mona," in a quilted dime-store night table and a sleeping Mexican painted on a cupboard door.

Decades later, they called to me, the memory of them morphing, changing, altering, becoming characters that were and were not them. And I kept writing about the loving and sometimes mysterious bonds of family. I dressed my characters, gave them habits and a particular way to speak, and put them down on the pages, wanting things they could not have, remembering things they wanted to forget.

Empty nest, retired husband... after thirty-three years of making beds and cooking dinners, Lily Gold has had it and decides to look for a job. Her husband Leon, however, doesn't like not having her at his beck and call and puts the kibosh on her chance of opening her own antique store by emptying out their bank account. This is marriage? This is war! Follow Lily as she turns the status quo into quid pro quo and gives her husband a run for the money.

An engaging and entertaining novel, Lily Gold's journey is the journey of every woman who wants love, respect and something of her very own. Penumbra Publishing, May 2012

PRAISE FOR LILY STEPS OUT:

~Joyce Carol Oates.~
"...engagingly written. The voice is shrewd, sharp, funny and yet tender."

~Dan's Papers~
"Oh that Lily Gold. Such a mouth... and mind... and heart. A smartass in dialogue, even more so in italicized interior thoughts, which can be hilarious. A diverse small group who serve as Lily's new friends have stories of their own which are well integrated into the plot. What fun and what a sophisticated spin on the familiar subject of a middle-aged woman who is bored with her life."

~Big Al's Book & Pals~
"Lots of humor (both from some idiosyncratic secondary characters and Lily herself), some soul searching, and plenty of conflict, all combine into a story that is both entertaining and enlightening."