Ellendea Proffer Teasley

About Ellendea's Work

Ellendea Proffer Teasley is an author, a translator, and co-founder of Ardis Publishers.

Ardis was a significant force in the publishing of Soviet literature.  In 1971, Teasley co-founded Ardis with her late husband Carl Proffer and has published authors including Vassily Aksyonov and Vladimir Voinovich.  Based in Ann Arbor in the 1970s and 1980s, Ardis Press specialized in Russian literature and featured the major Russian authors from the past two centuries in many monograph publications and in its journal, the Russian Literature Triquarterly.

Biography

Teasley is the author of Bulgakov: Life and Work (1984) and the editor of Vladimir Nabokov: A Pictorial Biography (1991).  A collection of original Ardis Press manuscripts and typescripts, correspondence, books, photographs, and proofs was acquired by the University of Michigan library and displayed as part of the library’s 2003 exhibit on early-twentieth-century Russian literature and art under the title of “St. Petersburg: Window on the East/Window on the West.”  She is now affiliated with the Casa Dana Group in Dana Point, California. 

Teasley received a B.A. (1966) from the University of Maryland, and an M.A. (1969) and Ph.D. (1971) from Indiana University.

Recent News

In addition to various articles and filmed interviews, Ellendea Proffer Teasley gave the keynote speech at the University of Michigan’s “Ann Arbor in Russian Literature” event in 2013. She recently finished a book-length memoir of the poet Joseph Brodsky, which will come out in Russia in 2015.

Updated July 2015