Tony Ardizzone was born and raised on the North Side of Chicago. He is the author of eight books of fiction. His novel In Bruno’s Shadow was published in Spring 2023 by Guernica Editions as part of its Guernica World Editions series. His other novels are The Whale Chaser, In the Garden of Papa Santuzzu, Heart of the Order, and In the Name of the Father. He has published three collections of short stories: The Arab’s Ox: Stories of Morocco, Taking It Home: Stories from the Neighborhood, and The Evening News: Stories. He currently lives in Portland, Oregon.

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, the Virginia Prize for Fiction, an 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, and other honors.

Ardizzone's short stories have appeared in dozens of literary journals and magazines including The Georgia Review, TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, Agni, Prairie Schooner, Witness, Chicago Review, Mississippi Review, Quarterly West, Many Mountains Moving, Shenandoah, The Gettysburg Review, and Epoch. His work has been reprinted in several anthologies including New Worlds of Literature: Writings from America's Many Cultures; Fiction: An Introduction to the Short Story; Don’t Tell Mama!: The Penguin Anthology of Italian American Writing; Hear My Voice: A Multicultural Anthology of Literature from the United States; Bless Me Father: Stories of Catholic Childhood; Smokestacks & Skyscrapers: An Anthology of Chicago Writing; Identity Lessons: Contemporary Writing about Learning to be American; Wild Dreams: The Best of Italian Americana; New Chicago Stories; The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses; Sweet Lemons: Writings with a Sicilian Accent; The Italian American Reader; Sarejevo: An Anthology for Bosnian Relief; and The Flannery O’Connor Award: Selected Stories. In 2010 Ardizzone wrote the foreword to the paperback edition of Raymond DeCapite's classic novel The Coming of Fabrizze, published by Kent State University Press. Ardizzone’s short stories are now being translated and published in a handful of literary journals and anthologies in Italy.

Ardizzone did his undergraduate work at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and was taught 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 his 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 an essay “My First True Writing Teacher” about J. Kerker Quinn’s death and his work with Daniel Curley.

Ardizzone taught for several years in the creative writing program at Old Dominion University and later accepted a position at Indiana University Bloomington. At Indiana he was named Chancellor's Professor of English and awarded one of the university’s highest honors, the Tracy M. Sonneborn Award, given annually to a faculy 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, Italy, and Greece, and 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's writing was also featured in the award-winning documentary And They Came to Chicago: The Italian American Legacy, narrated by Joe Mantegna and broadcast on PBS.

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.