| Tony Ardizzone | |
| Birth Name: | Anthony V. Ardizzone |
| Birth Place: | Chicago, Illinois, U.S. |
| Education: | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Bowling Green State University (MFA) University of Illinois at Chicago |
| Notable Works: | In the Name of the Father (1978) Heart of the Order (1986) The Evening News (1986) (1992) (1996) In the Garden of Papa Santuzzu (1999) |
| Awards: | Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction (1986) |
Anthony V. Ardizzone (born 1949 in Chicago, Illinois, United States) is an American novelist, short story writer, and editor.
Ardizzone was raised on the North Side of Chicago. He graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, in 1971 and from Bowling Green State University with an MFA in 1975. In 1973 he also did a year of study at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
He taught at Saint Mary's Center for Learning (Chicago), Bowling Green State University, Old Dominion University,[1] and Vermont College of Norwich University. In 1985, he taught at Mohammed V University in Rabat, Morocco. His work appeared in Ploughshares.[2]
He served on the board of directors of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs.
Ardizzone is a Chancellor's Professor in the MFA program at Indiana University,[3] and lives in Bloomington, Indiana.[4]
In addition to his extensive work as a creative writing instructor, Tony Ardizzone is widely acknowledged to be the originator of the "Wax The Floor Metaphor" for fiction writing, a well-known model for the drafting process of a literary work. Ardizzone's model differs from others' in key ways (certain imagery and performative embellishments used) but is considered by many to be the purest, most authentic version. The metaphor essentially advises students of creative writing to work in stages of complete drafts from beginning to end. Just as it would be ill-advised for a janitor to sweep, mop, wax and buff a single square of a tile floor before moving on to the next and repeating the process, students are warned with this model not to spend time editing and polishing individual paragraphs and chapters before the first draft has been completed and "the entire picture laid out," as novelist John Updike once put it.[5]