Tony Ardizzone is available to work with both creative writing workshops and community groups as well as individuals seeking advice about their manuscripts.

Ardizzone has taught creative writing and related courses at Bowling Green State University, Old Dominion University, the low-residency MFA program at Vermont College, and Indiana University Bloomington. He has given readings and lectures and led workshops at scores of North American universities, literary festivals, and creative writing conferences.

Ardizzone designed and developed Old Dominion University's creative writing program and for nine years served as its Program Director as well as the frequent director of its annual week-long literary festival. At Indiana University he served two terms as Director of Creative Writing and through his direction shaped the MFA program’s ongoing commitment to diversity. He also served as co-chair of Indiana University’s Diversity in the Arts Committee and assisted the university in its broader diversification efforts.

Ardizzone taught courses in writing fiction, the craft of fiction, creative writing pedagogy, 20th century American fiction, literary interpretation, and ethnic American literature, a upper-division course that he initiated as special topics and later submitted for official status, and which became the cornerstone of the English department’s subsequent offerings in undergraduate-level ethnic American literature. The university awarded Ardizzone with the rank of Chancellor's Professor of English and also named him recipient of one of the school’s highest honors, the Tracy M. Sonneborn Award, given annually to a single faculy member who has achieved local, national, and international acclaim for exemplary writing and teaching.

On a national level Ardizzone served two terms on the Board of Directors of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. He was the managing editor of three volumes of AWP’s Intro series, an annual anthology of fiction and poetry written by students in creative writing programs. Several years later, after AWP could no longer carry the series, Ardizzone founded, organized, and served as the managing editor of the Intro Journals Project. To celebrate the 25th anniversary of Indiana’s MFA program, Ardizzone edited the anthology The Habit of Art: Best Stories from the Indiana University Fiction Workshop. He twice served as a finalists judge for the Drue Heinz Literature Prize — each time advancing the manuscript that received the award — and also as a finalists judge for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award Series in the Novel. He was also a judge on the Fiction Fellowship Selection Committtee for the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, the Illinois Arts Council Individual Artists Fellowship Program, and the Ohio Arts Council Individual Artists Fellowship Program. Ardizzone worked as a manuscript consultant for several trade and university presses, including Viking Penguin, Harper Collins, Houghton Mifflin, Bedford/St. Martin's, Addison Wesley Longman, Prentice Hall, Southern Illinois University Press, University of Tennessee Press, Southern Methodist University Press, University of South Carolina Press, and Northern Illinois University Press. Recently the Danish Poets and Fiction Writers' Association appointed Ardizzone as a mentor for one of its scholarship students.

Books published by students whose graduate theses were directed by Ardizzone have received the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Iowa Short Fiction Award, the Grace Paley Award in Short Fiction, the A. E. Coppard Award for Fiction, the AWP Award for the Novel, and the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Fiction, among other honors, including shortlist status for the Dylan Thomas Prize, finalist status for the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award for Fiction, and finalist status for the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Prize.

Internationally, Ardizzone taught at Mohammed V University in Rabat, Morocco, as part of a faculty exchange sponsored by the United States Information Agency. While in Morocco, Ardizzone lectured on the craft of fiction and gave readings and lectures at universities in Casablanca, Rabat, and Fez. He also participated in an American Studies conference in Dubrovnik, Croatia, where once again he read from his work and lectured on the writing of fiction. He has recently traveled repeatedly to Italy for research on his forthcoming novel, In Bruno’s Shadow. Ardizzone was the featured fiction writer at the international conference "Re-Mapping Italian America: Places, Cultures, Identities," held in 2016 at the University of Rome Tre, where literary critics from both Europe and North America discussed and presented papers about his work. While in Italy he met with students at the University of Rome Tre and the University of Siena, several of whom chose Ardizzone's writing as the subject for their graduate theses. Since 1975 Ardizzone has conducted creative writing workshops and given fiction readings as well as lectures on the craft of writing and related literary topics at scores of North American colleges and universities.