Giardina's plays have been produced in New Haven, New York City, and Washington, D.C. He is a regular contributor to publications such as The New York Times Magazine, GQ, Esquire, and Harper's. His books include Men With Debts, A Boy's Pretensions, Recent History and The Country of Marriage.

His most recent novel, White Guys, was released by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on May 2, 2006.

He has held teaching positions at Mount Holyoke College, the University of Rochester and at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Giardina currently teaches at the University of Texas.

Anthony Giardina started his professional career as an actor. He switched to playwriting, and eventually began writing novels.

His work is particularly influenced by American culture in the 1950s. He was born in 1950 and grew up on a street in Waltham, Massachusetts, a largely Italian and Irish working class "sleeper" suburb of Boston on the trolley line to Cambridge. The protagonist's childhood neighborhood and schools in "Recent History" were largely modeled on Waltham.

According to the author, Recent History was marketed toward the "gay market". Though Giardina himself is not gay, he possesses a remarkable ability to express the internal dialogue and emotional motivations of a diverse range of characters.

Anthony Giardina on writing: "When I write fiction, I become the character I'm writing about, just as an actor becomes a character he's playing. You use parts of yourself, people you have known, things that have happened to you, but you're always aware that these things are being used to create a persona that's distinctly not you. Otherwise it wouldn't be any fun."