Early life and education
Ardizzone was born in 1949 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. His Italian American upbringing, particularly his family's Sicilian roots, later became a recurring subject in his fiction.
He earned a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1971, where he studied creative writing under J. Kerker Quinn, Daniel Curley, Paul Friedman, and George Scouffas. After a year of graduate study at the University of Illinois at Chicago, he completed a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing at Bowling Green State University in 1975, studying with Philip F. O'Connor, Robert Early, and John Clellon Holmes.
Career
Early in his career, Ardizzone taught basic writing at Saint Mary's Center for Learning, an inner-city high school on Chicago's West Side, and freshman composition at Bowling Green State University. After the publication of his first novel, he joined the English department at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, where he founded and directed the undergraduate creative writing program and earned tenure.
In 1985, Ardizzone taught at Mohammed V University in Rabat, Morocco, through a faculty exchange sponsored by the United States Information Agency. The residency later provided the basis for his collection Larabi's Ox: Stories of Morocco.
In 1987, Ardizzone joined Indiana University Bloomington and twice served as director of its Creative Writing Program. In 2006, he was named a Chancellor's Professor of English. He received the Tracy M. Sonneborn Award in 2005 and the Trustees Award for Teaching in 2012.
He also taught in the low-residency MFA program at Vermont College in Montpelier and served two terms on the board of directors of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs. He retired from Indiana University in 2013 and later lived in Portland, Oregon. He currently lives on Orcas Island in Washington.
Writing
Novels
Ardizzone's debut novel, In the Name of the Father, was published by Doubleday in 1978. Set on Chicago's North Side, the coming-of-age novel follows Tonto Schwartz, the son of an Italian mother and a Jewish father who dies when Tonto is an infant. Shortly after its publication, Ardizzone appeared on The Studs Terkel Program on WFMT Chicago.
His second novel, Heart of the Order, was published by Henry Holt and Company in 1986 and won the Virginia Prize for Fiction, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and was named one of the 10 Best Sports Books 1986 by the National Sports Review. The novel follows minor-league baseball player Danny "Kiss of the Wolf" Bacigalupo, whose life is shaped by a fatal boyhood accident.
His third novel, In the Garden of Papa Santuzzu, was published in hardcover by Picador USA/St. Martin's Press in 1999 and in paperback in 2000. Told through the alternating voices of seven siblings in a Sicilian family who emigrated to the United States in the early twentieth century, the novel incorporates Sicilian folktales and songs into its immigrant narrative.
The Whale Chaser, published in 2010 by Academy Chicago Publishers and reissued in paperback by Chicago Review Press in 2015, follows Vince Sansone from 1960s Chicago to Tofino, British Columbia, where he becomes a whale watching guide.
Ardizzone's fifth novel, In Bruno's Shadow, was published in 2023 by Guernica Editions as part of its Guernica World Editions series. Set in Rome against the backdrop of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami and the final illness of Pope John Paul II, the novel follows a Croatian housekeeper named Dubravka and eight residents of a pensione near the statue of Giordano Bruno in the Campo de' Fiori.
Short-story collections
Ardizzone's first collection, The Evening News, won the 1985 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and was published by the University of Georgia Press in 1986. The press reissued it in paperback in 2013 for the award's thirtieth anniversary. Set largely in Chicago's blue-collar neighborhoods, its eleven stories focus on second-generation Italian American, Catholic, and working-class characters.
His second collection, Larabi's Ox: Stories of Morocco, was published by Milkweed Editions in 1992 and won the Milkweed National Fiction Prize, judged that year by novelist Gloria Naylor, who also wrote the foreword. The book also received the Chicago Foundation for Literature Award for Fiction, a Pushcart Prize, the Lawrence Foundation Award in Fiction, and an Individual Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. The linked stories follow three Americans in Morocco whose experiences intersect with those of Moroccan characters. In 2018, Bordighera Press published a revised edition under the title The Arab's Ox: Stories of Morocco.
His third collection, Taking It Home: Stories from the Neighborhood, was published in 1996 by the University of Illinois Press under its Sunsinger Books imprint.
Editing
Ardizzone edited The Habit of Art: Best Stories from the Indiana University Fiction Workshop, published by Indiana University Press in 2005 to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of Indiana University's MFA program. The anthology features work by twenty-one graduates of the program, including Brian Leung, Dana Johnson, and Renée Manfredi.
He also served as managing editor of three volumes of the AWP Intro anthology series and founded the organization's Intro Journals Project, which he coordinated for the project's first two years.
