Tony Ardizzone was born and raised on the North Side of Chicago. He attended grammar school at Saint Gregory the Great parish and high school at Saint George, where he was taught by the Christian Brothers. He is the author of eight books of fiction. His most recent novel, In Bruno’s Shadow, was published in 2023 by Guernica Editions in Canada as part of its Guernica World Editions series. His other novels are The Whale Chaser (Academy Chicago/Chicago Review Press), In the Garden of Papa Santuzzu (Picador, St. Martin’s), Heart of the Order (Henry Holt), and In the Name of the Father (Doubleday). He has published three collections of short stories: The Arab’s Ox: Stories of Morocco (Milkweed Editions/Bordighera Press), Taking It Home: Stories from the Neighborhood (University of Illinois Press), and The Evening News: Stories (University of Georgia Press). He also wrote the foreword to the paperback edition of Raymond DeCapite's classic novel The Coming of Fabrizze (Kent State University Press).
In 2013 he relocated to the Pacific Northwest and currently lives in Portland, Oregon.
Ardizzone did his undergraduate work at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and was taught creative writing by J. Kerker Quinn, Daniel Curley, Paul Friedman, and George Scouffas. After a year of taking courses at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he studied with Michael Anania, John Frederick Nims, Eugene Wildman, and Ralph J. Mills, Ardizzone earned an MFA from Bowling Green State University, working with Philip F. O'Connor, Robert Early, and John Clellon Holmes. When The Quivering Pen invited Ardizzone to write about a “first-time” experience, he wrote the essay “My First True Writing Teacher” about J. Kerker Quinn’s death and his work with Daniel Curley, who took over Quinn’s undergraduate fiction workshop after Quinn’s passing .
Ardizzone taught basic writing skills at Saint Mary’s Center for Learning, an inner-city high school located on Chicago’s West Side, and freshman composition at Bowling Green State University. After his first book was published, Ardizzone was offered a position in the English department at Old Dominion University, where he earned tenure. Following the publication of his next two books he accepted a position at Indiana University Bloomington. At Indiana he was named Chancellor's Professor of English and awarded the Trustee’s Award for Teaching as well as one of the university’s highest honors, the Tracy M. Sonneborn Award, given annually to a single faculty member who has achieved local, national, and international acclaim for both their writing and their teaching. For several years Ardizzone also taught in the low-residency MFA program at Vermont College.
Ardizzone's work has been the subject of doctoral dissertations in the United States and Italy. His work has been discussed in several North American and Italian critical texts, including By the Breath of Their Mouths: Narratives of Resistance in Italian America, by Mary Jo Bona; From Wiseguys to Wise Men: The Gangster and Italian American Masculinities, by Fred Gardaphé; Return Narratives: Ethnic Space in Late Twentieth-Century Greek American and Italian American Literature, by Theodora Patrona; A Semiotic of Ethnicity: In (Re)Cognition of the Italian/American Writer, by Anthony Julian Tamburri; The Routledge History of Italian Americans, edited by William J. Connell and Stanislao G. Pugliese; Re-Mapping Italian Americana: Places, Cultures, Identities, edited by Sabrina Vellucci and Carla Francellini; and Beyond 'The Godfather': Italian American Writers on the Real Italian American Experience, edited by A. Kenneth Ciongoli and Jay Parini.
Ardizzone was asked to read two chapters from his novel In the Garden of Papa Santuzzu and his short story “Nonna” for inclusion in And They Wrote About Chicago: Chicago’s Italian American Writers, a special feature on the DVD of the award-winning documentary And They Came to Chicago: The Italian American Legacy, narrated by Joe Mantegna and broadcast on PBS and NBC5 (Chicago).
Ardizzone’s writing has been awarded the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Milkweed Editions National Fiction Prize, the Chicago Foundation for Literature Award for Fiction sponsored by the Friends of Literature, the Virginia Prize for Fiction, the Oregon Literary Fellowship, the Pushcart Prize, the Lawrence Foundation Award, the Bruno Arcudi Literature Prize, two Individual Artist Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, several Distinguished Story citations in Best American Short Stories, and other honors.
Ardizzone's stories have appeared in dozens of literary journals including The Georgia Review, TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, Agni, Prairie Schooner, Witness, Chicago Review, Mississippi Review, Seattle Review, Quarterly West, Sonora Review, Texas Quarterly, Many Mountains Moving, Black Warrior Review, Carolina Quarterly, Shenandoah, High Plains Literary Review, The Gettysburg Review, and Epoch, as well as a variety of North American and Italian anthologies (partial list follows).
New Worlds of Literature: Writings from America's Many Cultures (W.W. Norton & Company 1989) 2nd edition (Norton 1994)
New Chicago Stories (City Stoop Press 1990)
The Flannery O’Connor Award: Selected Stories (University of Georgia Press 1992)
From the Margins: Writings in Italian Americana (Purdue University Press 1992)
Hear My Voice: A Multicultural Anthology of Literature from the United States (Addison Wesley 1993)
The Pushcart Prize, XVIII: Best of the Small Presses (Pushcart Press 1993)
Bless Me Father: Stories of Catholic Childhood (Plume/Penguin Books 1994)
Fiction: An Introduction to the Short Story (NTC: Contemporary Publishing 1998)
Identity Lessons: Contemporary Writing about Learning to be American (Penguin Books 1999)
Smokestacks & Skyscrapers: An Anthology of Chicago Writing (Loyola University Press 1999)
Fiction: The Elements of the Short Story (McGraw-Hill 2001)
Best of Prairie Schooner: Fiction and Poetry (University of Nebraska Press 2001)
Don’t Tell Mama: The Penguin Anthology of Italian American Writing (Penguin Books 2002)
Sweet Lemons: Writings with a Sicilian Accent (Legas Books 2004)
The Italian American Reader: A Collection of Outstanding Fiction, Memoirs, Journalism, Essays, and Poetry (HarperCollins 2005)
Wild Dreams: The Best of Italian Americana (Fordham University Press 2008)
Hold That Knowledge: Stories about Love from the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction (University of Georgia Press 2019)
Good and Balanced: Stories about Sports from the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction (University of Georgia Press, 2020)
Growing Up: Stories about Adolescence from the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction (University of Georgia Press 2021)
New Foundations of Creative Writing (Bloomsbury Academic, forthcoming 2027)
Lo stato delle cose: Pensiero critico e scritture (Oedipus Edizioni 2000)
Atti Impuri: Luogo di scritture (Miraggi Edizioni 2011)
Uè Paisà: Racconti dall’identità italoamericana (Manni Editori 2012)
Miraggi italiani (Artemide Edizioni 2020)
Shortly after the publication of his first book, the novel In the Name of the Father, Ardizzone was invited to to be a guest on "The Studs Terkel Program," which aired weekdays on 98.7 WFMT Chicago. Terkel's conversation with Ardizzone, broadcast on 9 February 1979, is now available through the Studs Terkel Radio Archive.
Written transcripts of other conversations with Ardizzone appear on this site's Interviews page.