Tony Ardizzone

 

TONY ARDIZZONE was born and raised on the North Side of Chicago. He attended grammar school at Saint Gregory the Great parish, where he served as an altar boy and harbored hopes of someday becoming a priest, and then went to Saint George High School, where the Christian Brothers dispelled all notions that he was worthy. In 1971 he graduated with a B.A. with Honors from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, though his degree was not formally released until two years later due to court proceedings arising from his involvement in a peaceful, nonviolent anti-war protest and subsequent arrest as one of the so-called "Champaign 39." In 1975 he received a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, Fiction, from Bowling Green State University in Ohio. He also did a year of graduate study in English at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1973. He is the author of six books of fiction and has edited four anthologies